Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1. Edwards Henry Sutherland

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СКАЧАТЬ forty masses during forty hours. At each successive mass the priest, uttering certain mystic words, pricked the wax image, until finally, at the fortieth mass, he pierced it to the heart, in order to bring about the death of the king. Thirteen years later, under the reign of Henry IV., the Duke de Biron, who had his head cut off in the Bastille, publicly accused Laffin, his confidant and denunciator, of being in league with the devil, and of possessing wax figures which spoke. Marie de Medicis employed, even whilst in exile, a magician named Fabroni, much hated by Richelieu, for whom Fabroni had predicted a speedy death.

      It was in front of Notre Dame that by order of the princes, dukes, peers, and marshals of France, assembled in the Grand Chamber of Parliament, Damiens was condemned to do penance before being tortured and torn to pieces. He was to be tormented, by methods no matter how barbarous, until he revealed his accomplices, and was also required to make the amende honorable before the principal door of Notre Dame. Thither, in his shirt, he was conveyed on a sledge, with a lighted wax candle in his hand weighing two pounds; and there he went down on his knees, and confessed that “wickedly and traitorously he had perpetrated the most detestable act of wounding the king in the right side with the stab of a knife”; that he repented of the deed, and asked pardon for it of God, of the king, and of justice. After this he was to be carried on the sledge to the Place de Grève, where, on the scaffold, he was to undergo a variety of tortures, copied from those appointed for the punishment of Ravaillac. Finally, his goods were to be confiscated, the house where he was born pulled down, and his name stigmatised as infamous, and for ever forbidden thenceforth, under the severest penalties, to be borne by any French subject.

      Damiens had been educated far above his rank. His moral character, however, was peculiarly bad. His life had been one perpetual oscillation between debauchery and fanaticism. His changeableness of disposition was noticed during his imprisonment at Versailles. Sometimes he seemed thoroughly composed, as though he had suffered nothing and had nothing to suffer; at other times he burst into sudden and vehement passions, and attempted to kill himself against the walls of his dungeon or with the chains on his feet. As in one of his furious fits he had tried to bite off his tongue, his teeth were all drawn, in accordance with an official order.

      When the sentence was read to him, Damiens simply remarked, “La journée sera rude.” Every kind of torture was applied to him to extort confessions. His guards remained at his side night and day, taking note of the cries and exclamations which escaped him in the midst of his sufferings. But Damiens had nothing to confess, and on the 28th of January he was carried, with his flesh lacerated and charred by fire, his bones broken, to the place of execution.

      Immediately after his self-accusation in front of Notre Dame he was taken to the Place de Grève, where the hand which had held the knife was burnt with the flames of sulphur. Then he was torn with pincers in the arms and legs, the thighs and the breast, and into his wounds were poured red hot lead and boiling oil, with pitch, wax, and sulphur melted and mixed. The sufferer endured these tortures with surprising energy. He cried out from time to time, “Lord, give me patience and strength.” “But he did not blaspheme,” says Barbier, in his narrative of the scene, “nor mention any names.”

      The end of the hideous tragedy was the dismemberment. The four traditional horses were not enough. Two more were added, and still the operation did not advance. Then the executioner, filled with horror, went to the neighbouring Hôtel de Ville to ask permission to use “the axe at the joints.” He was, according to Barbier, sharply rebuked by the king’s attendants, though in an account of the tragedy contributed at the time to the Gentleman’s Magazine (and derived from the gazettes published in Holland, where there was no censorship), the executioner was blamed for having delayed the employment of the axe so long.

      There are conflicting accounts, too, as to the burning of the prisoner’s calves. It was said on the one hand that the garde des sceaux, Machault, caused red hot pincers to be applied in his presence to Damiens’ legs at the preliminary examination; but another version declares this to be a mistake, and ascribes the burning of his legs to the king’s attendants, who, seeing their master stabbed, are represented as punishing the assassin by the unlikely method of applying torches to his calves.

      The torture of Damiens lasted many hours, and it was not till midnight, when both his legs and one of his arms had been torn off, that his remaining arm was dragged from the socket. The life of the poor wretch could scarcely have lasted so long as did the execution of the sentence passed upon him. A report of the trial was published by the Registrar of the Parliament; but the original record being destroyed, it is impossible to test the authenticity of this report. It fills four small volumes, and is entitled “Pièces Originales et Procèdures du Procès fait à Robert François Damiens, Paris, 1757.”

      Ivan the Terrible, when his digestion was out of order, and he felt unequal to the effort of breakfasting, used to revive his jaded appetite by visiting the prisons and seeing criminals tortured. George Selwyn claimed to have made amends for his want of feeling in attending to see Lord Lovat’s head cut off by going to the undertaker’s to see it sewn on again, when, in presence of the decapitated corpse, he exclaimed with strange humour, and in imitation of the voice and manner of the Lord Chancellor at the trial: – “My Lord Lovat, your lordship may rise.” This dilettante in the sufferings of others is known to have paid a visit to Paris for the express purpose of seeing Damiens torn in pieces. On the day of the execution, according to Mr. Jesse (“George Augustus Selwyn and his contemporaries”), “he mingled with the crowd in a plain undress and bob wig,” when a French nobleman, observing the deep interest he took in the scene, and supposing from the simplicity of his attire that he was a person of the humbler ranks in life, chose to imagine that the stranger must infallibly be an executioner. “Eh, bien, monsieur,” he said, “êtes-vous arrivé pour voir ce spectacle?” “Oui, monsieur.” “Vous êtes bourreau?” “Non, non, monsieur, je n’ai pas cet honneur; je ne suis qu’un amateur.”

      Wraxall tells the story somewhat differently. “Selwyn’s nervous irritability,” he says, “and anxious curiosity to observe the effect of dissolution on men, exposed him to much ridicule, not unaccompanied with censure. He was accused of attending all executions, disguised sometimes, to elude notice, in female attire. I have been assured that in 1756 (or 1757) he went over to Paris expressly for the purpose of witnessing the last moments of Damiens, who expired in the most acute tortures for having attempted the life of Louis XV. Being among the crowd, and attempting to approach too near the scaffold, he was at first repulsed by one of the executioners, but having explained that he had made the journey from London solely with a view to be present at the punishment and death of Damiens, the man immediately caused the people to make way, exclaiming at the same time: – ‘Faites place pour monsieur; c’est un Anglais et un amateur.’”

      According to yet another story on this doleful subject, for which Horace Walpole is answerable, the Paris executioner, styled “Monsieur de Paris,” was surrounded by a number of provincial executioners, “Monsieur de Rouen,” “Monsieur de Bordeaux,” and so on. Selwyn joined the group, and on explaining to the Paris functionary that he was from London, was saluted with the exclamation, “Ah, monsieur de Londres!”

      Among the minor celebrations of which the interior of Notre Dame has been the scene may be mentioned a mass said some twenty years before the Revolution for the broken arm of the famous dancer, Madeleine Guimard. One evening, when the fascinating Madeleine was performing in Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, a heavy cloud fell from the theatrical heavens upon one of her slender arms and broke it. Then it was that the services of the Church were invoked on behalf of the popular ballerina.

      The interesting and graceful, though far from beautiful, Madeleine, was justly esteemed by the clergy; for during the severe winter of 1768 she had given to every destitute family in her neighbourhood enough to live on for a year, at the same time paying personal visits to each of them. “Not yet Magdalen repentant, but already Magdalen charitable!” exclaimed a famous preacher, in reference to Madeleine Guimard’s good action. “The hand,” he added, “which knows СКАЧАТЬ