Vidocq and the San sons. mcrnt, where the host came to welcome us. He told us that his emoluments, once large, had, from the diminished number of capital punishments, been much reduced; and though he had de quoi vn're withal to live'), his etat was very dif ferent now from w hat it had been in other days. This may have been an apology for our finding no repast prepared in return for M. Appert's hos pitality. He repeated to us that the office had been for generations hereditary to his race. Mar riages had been generally confined to families con nected with the same profession, of which there were several in the provinces. "Sanson gave many particulars of what had happened on memorable occasions between the moment when he had received the condamne from the prison authorities and that in which the task was completed by him as the exe'euteur ties hautes aruvres. He stated — and we had afterwards an opportunity of verifying the fact — that the proces verbaux of every public execution were kept with the utmost accuracy. He asserted that it had never been otherwise in the worst time of the French Revolution; which most assuredly would prove that the number of sufferers, as ordinarily reported and believed, must have been enormously exaggerated. He repeated again and again that the amount of physical suffering from the fall of the axe and the separation of the head from the body was exceedingly small, — that death was in stantaneous; that in the whole of his experience he had never seen a voluntary motion of the muscles after decapitation; that the stories of the opening and closing of the eyelids after execution were inventions contradicted by the whole of his observations, without a single example to the con trary; that the extinction of feeling and of life fol lowed the fatal event immediately, and without a single exceptional case. "We asked whether it were possible to see the
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records — the proces verbaux of executions — of which he had spoken. He produced some vol umes, handsomely bound, beautifully written, in whose pages were officialized the details, signed by persons present, of what had taken place at every execution from the time the condamne was handed over to the executcur up to the moment on which the body was transferred to those who were commissioned to receive it. "He desired us to accompany him to an out house. It was a sort of stable, in the centre of which the mecanique raised its awful head. It was painted blood-red, — a tall, erect frame, much narrower, much higher, than that of a com mon gallows. A massive, sloping knife was sus pended at the top; a cord hung down by the side of the frame. The assistants stood on a platform below. Just above them was a plank, with a round hole for the reception of the head, at the base of which was an opening through which the axe was to pass in severing the head from the body. The plank moved backwards and forwards in a groove; it was raised by an axle at the two sides perpendicularly. In an instant the sufferer was attached to it by cords; it was then thrown down flat and moved horizontally forward; at the same moment the cord was pulled, the heavy axe fell down through the iron frame, and a basket was seen to receive the head of the victim, almost as soon as the click was heard an nouncing that the axe had been detached from the beam to which it had been fastened. Then the plank was drawn back, the headless body untied, and Sanson asked us to feel how sharp was the edge and remark how ponderous the weight of the instrument. The edge was certainly as sharp as that of»a razor, and the momentum was in creased by a mass of lead attached to the upper side of the decapitator. Torture or mishap seemed impossible."
