Anne-Marie pitied me for such stories but after an expression of sympathy maintained a wary silence. Our newlyweds' happiness was then colored by a kind of quiet. There were other stories I didn't share with her. After Mongeot, a man named Damiens who had tried to stab the King was sentenced to be drawn and quartered. No one had been quartered in France since Ravaillac, more than a century before. I went to my father, who said he had no advice to give. I offered to resign my commission, but my grandmother summoned my uncle, executioner of Reims, to steady me. Our assistants were to handle the preliminaries, and on the appointed day drank until they could barely stand. They tottered between the instruments while the crowd jeered at their fumblings and shouted abuse. The hand that had held the knife was severed and boiling oil and lead were poured into the wound. The man's screams were such that we could not hear each others' instructions. Then the horses only dislocated his limbs without separating them from the trunk. The executioner's sword lodged in one of his shoulder joints. I had to run and find an axe.
Some three months after the fall of the Bastille, the National Assembly took up the issue of renovating the penal code, and in the middle of those proceedings, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, deputy from Paris and professor of anatomy on the Faculty of Medicine, set forth his argument favoring a fixed punishment for the same crimes, regardless of the convicted's rank and estate. He reminded the Assembly of the infamies of the unenlightened past and proposed a less barbaric method of capital punishment: automatic decapitation by a mechanism yet to be developed. A Jesuit, he'd left the order, choosing a ministry of the body over that of the soul. He wanted the machinery of execution to be fearful but the death to be easy. There was enthusiasm for his proposal among the revolutionaries: a capital punishment that was mercifully quick and democratic would mark another step toward the regeneration of society. It was pointed out that while the executioner's sword might require two or three strokes, with a machine the condemned man would not be kept waiting. Lally-Tollendal's name was resurrected: some years before, I'd proven unable to dispatch him, requiring my father to take over the blade.
After the usual delay the measure was adopted in the new penal code, and the next challenge became how to cut off all those heads. I was invited to submit a memorandum sharing my views, in which I explained that in any multiple execution, the sword is not fit to perform after the first, but must be either reground and sharpened or replaced by an impractical succession of swords, depending on the number condemned. I also pointed out that for an execution by sword to arrive at the result prescribed by the law, the executioner must be consistently skillful and the condemned at least momentarily steadfast, and that in the event of multiple executions, there would be the issue of blood in such quantities that it would affect even the most intrepid of those to be executed, so that it would be indispensable to find some means by which the condemned could be secured for the blow, and the public order protected.
Dr. Guillotin had begun to lose interest in his idea, but Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, engaged a German pianomaker to build the prototype. There was some difficulty finding men to do the job. They had to be made exempt from signing the usual working papers so that their identities could remain a secret.
The result is what my assistants call the Great Machine. At the heart of its design are two uprights five meters high and fifty centimeters apart, which flank a blade weighing seven kilos. Bolted to the top of the blade is a thirty-kilogram iron bar to heighten the force of its descent. The assembly falls from top to bottom in three quarters of a second. The cutting edge is slanted so that the blow, as it penetrates into the parts it divides, acts as a saw of lightning efficiency. The blade lands at the head of a narrow tablelike arrangement for the condemned. From a distance the whole thing has the austerity of a diagram. The grooves are rubbed down with soap before each use. Disassembled, it's stored in a shed known as the Widow's House.
My sons and I supervised its first test at the Bicêtre Hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Before us and the assembled dignitaries Dr.
Louis beheaded a bundle of straw, a live sheep, and several corpses, the last of which required three tries, so it was decided the height of the uprights would be extended, and weight added to the blade. At that very first demonstration, I was heard to wonder aloud whether the machine's very efficiency would prove to be a source of regret.
So on the 22nd of March in the year 1792, the Abbé Chappe bestowed his invention, the telegraph, upon the Assembly. And on the 25th, Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Louis's machine was inaugurated. The culprit was strapped facedown to the plank, which was then tilted to the horizontal and run forward on grooves until his neck slid onto the lunette, a semicircular block. The block was not struck by the falling blade but grazed at high speed, so that the head was planed off. In an eye-blink it leapt seventeen or eighteen inches from the trunk. For some the head was gone before the eye could trace the blow. It became clear that the minimum size for the basket must be that of an infant's bathtub. The executioner's role in the proceedings consisted of giving a little tug on a lever. The crowd saw the blade but not the hand that moved it. Much time was consumed afterward with the mess. Four buckets of water alone were used on the grooves and block.
I used to have a constitution able to endure labor that might have hamstrung a team of oxen. Now my complaints include dizziness, inflammation of the eyes, colic, and rheumatic pains.
What talk I have with Anne-Marie occurs in the early morning before the workday begins. On the way out of our little courtyard I'll pass her hanging laundry to dry, if it's warm enough, or plucking salad herbs into a basket. Across from us a shop sells brushes of every manner and use. Its proprietor is a drunk and in all weather slumps beside its door in an old wreck of an iron chair. We can hear the knife grinder's bell as he makes his rounds.
For the last three months I've approached her heartbroken with the misfortune I helped author, because in August at the execution of three men accused of forging promissory notes, our youngest boy, Gabriel, fell when exhibiting one of the heads, fracturing his skull and dying before my eyes. He was twenty-one. There'd always been in our family puzzled concern about him, since he'd kept hidden his aspirations and inner life. All we knew was that he was great for peeling oranges when they were in season. In response to interrogatives he stroked his upper lip with his forefinger and seemed to wait for the intelligent part of the question to emerge. He'd wanted to try his hand at another profession, and Anne-Marie had wished the same for him. But I'd reminded her of his cousin's experience of having apprenticed himself to a locksmith only to find that no one would patronize their shop. The subject had been dropped. Then Gabriel had offered to join the National Guard, to which his older brother had responded by asking if he thought himself too refined for the family business. His uncles hadn't been even that kind. I had done my best to comfort him but had also requested that he remain a realist about his future.
That morning the clouds had poured forth rain, the sky churning as if with empyrean seas. The wood up on the scaffold was slick and the cobblestones below greasy with mud. Our hair was whipped by the wind. There'd been the usual silence as the executioner had walked about the platform, while each assistant tended to a special task, one assistant handling the strapping to the plank, one seeing to the remaining condemned, one adjusting the heads on the lunette while wearing a waxed ankle-length apron. Each assistant is given a chance at one point or another to display one of the heads.