Travelers' Tales Paris (45 page)

It was to Schmidt that he brought Dr. Guillotin's ideas. It was Schmidt, whose name has barely come down to us, who designed the guillotine, but it was the humane Dr. Guillotin whose name got attached to it. He came to be seen as one of the villains of the Revolution, and even of history. During his lifetime—he lived until 1814—he often seemed an object of horror, or else an object of fun. People who passed him in the street would shake their head or give themselves karate chops to the back of the neck. He died a disillusioned man.

In March of 1792 Sanson and Schmidt submitted their designs to a government official at the Tuileries. The King came in and looked them over. He was an enthusiastic amateur locksmith, and it is said that he made suggestions for improving the design of the machine that would ten months later lop off his own head.

The first guillotine was built, and on April 15 Sanson tried it out on some live sheep. Two days later he decapitated three corpses—two men and one woman—in the courtyard of the hospital at Bicêtre, while a crowd of officials, including Dr. Guillotin, looked on. Eight days after that it was used on a thief named Jacques Pelletier. It worked so perfectly that Tobias Schmidt, the harpsichord maker, got orders for 34 more. Someone is supposed to have said: I hope this doesn't make killing people too easy.

The Terror began the next year, and a guillotine mentality, guillotine fads, swept over the city, together with insane rumors. Did severed heads feel pain, was the guillotine humane or not? Learned men, and some not so learned, disputed this point. Experiments were conducted on heads. When pricked with a knife point, tongues were said to retract into the mouth; when turned to the sun, pupils were said to dilate. Charlotte Corday's cheeks were said to have blushed when one of Sanson's assistants slapped her face as
he showed her head to the crowd. The general belief seemed to be that severed heads continued to feel pain until they had cooled.

Meanwhile, there were charms for bracelets in the form of guillotines, and toy guillotines for children. Small guillotines were sold to farmers for beheading chickens. At dinner parties similar guillotines beheaded tiny dolls; out flowed a red liqueur into which men dipped their fingers, women their handkerchiefs. Songs were written. Cartoons appeared, in one of which Sanson himself lay bound under the blade; according to the caption he had guillotined everyone else, so there was no one left to guillotine but himself.

Sanson had four assistants, then seven; two tumbrels, then nine. Some days he worked from dawn to dark. He complained of overwork, of burgeoning expenses. He kept asking the Committee of Public Safety for more money; eventually he got it, a bonus of 20,000 livres. Between March 1793 and July 1794, a period of 502 days, he, his brothers, his sons, and whatever other assistants were on the scaffold with him killed 2,362 people. Sensitive? Softhearted? Some were people Sanson knew and had had official contact with; others he came to know, for the ride to the place of execution was frequently long, sometimes two hours or more, and he would converse with them. In addition there were rain delays—Paris is a rainy place—and a rainy, bloody scaffold with that great snaggletooth hanging overhead was too dangerous to work on. While the rain lasted, executioner and condemned prisoners alike would huddle under the scaffold, and again Sanson would converse with them. Sometimes he would apologize for making them wait.

He executed everyone sent to him, no questions asked, nine men over 80, sixteen artists, twenty-five writers, the King, the Queen, the actress Marie Grandmaison and her 18-year-old-serving girl, and eventually, Danton, Robespierre, Public Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, and most of the others, the signers of the death warrants, the very men he had been taking his orders from.

Under the Revolution he became, in his own eyes at least, a figure of importance. As he saw it he was respected everywhere he went. He was certainly good at his job. The mass graves in this
garden attest to that. He once killed 21 men in 38 minutes. He made them get out of the carts and stand in rows facing away from the scaffold. One by one he ordered them to mount the steps. On top their legs were bound together with ropes. Their arms were already bound. They were strapped to the bascule. Their heads were tipped into the lunette. The two halves came together and locked. Down came the blade. Unstrap him. Undo the ropes. Into the basket with him. Next.

Such speed was possible because virtually none of the victims made a fuss. They were all too proud. The rich were especially haughty. They looked out over the cheering mob, their lips came together in what was close to absolute contempt, and they went to their deaths without so much as a grimace. Madame du Barry, once the mistress of Louis XV but now a raddled, middle-aged woman, did kick and scream. It took three men to hold her while her hair was cut and her arms bound. But she was the exception. It was the opinion of a number of witnesses that if everyone had behaved just like her the public would have sickened of the spectacle much more quickly than it did; the Terror would never have lasted so long.

As far as Sanson was concerned the Revolution produced only one tragedy. One day his son Gabriel, who had been assisting him on the scaffold from the age of eleven, but who was by then a grown man, was parading around the perimeter showing someone's head to the mob. He fell off the edge and was killed instantly. There were railings around every scaffold after that, but Sanson, it was said, was never the same.

The guillotine devoured nearly everyone who came near it, with one glaring exception—Sanson himself—which seems, on the face of it, incredible. He was arrested twice. A Royalist press was found in a room in his house that he had rented out. He argued his way of that one. Later on he and his two brothers were arrested and charged with being Royalist sympathizers—they had hanged, clubbed, and broken the King's enemies for years, had they not? What else could they be? A charge like this was sufficient to send scores of men to the scaffold, but the Sanson case posed a special
problem: who do you get to execute the executioners? In the 1790s you could not just phone up some other town and fly in a substitute. Meanwhile, death warrants were piling up on somebody's desk. People were waiting to be executed, and there was no one to do it.

So again they let the Sansons go. Soon afterwards Charles-Henri became so busy and also so essential that he was never bothered again.

There were not even recriminations once the Terror finally ended. Outraged or grief-stricken relatives might have come forward. None did. There might have been cries for revenge, but if there were no one heard them. By the standards of the Nuremberg trials Sanson would certainly have been arrested and prosecuted as a war criminal. But this was not 1945. He was a government functionary. He had obeyed orders. He had done his job. He died in bed in 1806.

By then he had been succeeded by his son. Later came his grandson, sixth and last in the line, who got himself fired. He lost his job, and his descendants lost their jobs at the same time. Between 1840 and 1847 this last Sanson guillotined only eighteen people. He was supposed to be a tenderhearted executioner too, and this is offered as the reason he gave himself to gambling and fast women. He felt an intense revulsion for who he was and what he did that could be assuaged in no other way. But the result was unfortunate: he went heavily into debt and faced debtor's prison.

He pawned the guillotine for the sum he needed, 3,800 francs. He was hoping to be able to redeem it in time.

But someone took a shot at the King (for France had kings again now). The would-be assassin was caught, and the authorities went looking for the executioner. Then they went looking for the guillotine. At first they couldn't find either. Finally Sanson came back. He was 48 years old. The authorities redeemed the guillotine for him, the execution took place, and then they sacked him, and the family dynasty, after just under 200 years, was over.

A new one promptly started. Louis Deibler became
Monsieur de Paris
. In 1870 the number of executioners was reduced to one,
whose jurisdiction encompassed the entire country. There was only one guillotine too, plus a spare, of course; he and it moved about the roads as needed.
Monsieur de Paris
had become
Monsieur de France
. Louis Deibler was succeeded by his nephew Anatole Deibler, who was succeeded by his nephew Henri Desfourneaux, and then by André Obrecht, another nephew of Anatole, who performed the last public execution in 1939 and who later was credited with having “perfected” the guillotine—he put ball bearings instead of grease in the grooves. The great blade still weighed seventy pounds—now it dropped more quickly. When it spoke, people listened. With it Obrecht executed 387 criminals to 1977. He was something of a natty dresser. That is, he became famous for wearing his hat while he worked. There was perhaps something subliminal there—his clients had nothing to wear hats on. He kept going until he was 78 years old, then retired in favor of his nephew by marriage, Marcel Chevalier, the present incumbent and perhaps the last in history, for France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

Every country has its “traditional” method of execution. The Spaniards garrote, the English hang, the Americans electrocute, and the French guillotine; and although the result is the same in all cases, it is the last-named that has so fascinated the world. The very thought of it, it is said, is enough to make a man feel a chill on the back of his neck. No method is “nice,” nor are they always instantaneous. Men in electric chairs jerk and sometimes fry. Men hanged sometimes squirm, strangling, for some time. However, the sensibilities of onlookers are not assaulted. The mess is self-contained. Hanging, garroting, electrocution—these can seem almost euphemisms for killing. The guillotine, by contrast, is graphic, noisy, bloody—the real thing.

And so to a good many people, though not to the French, who remained married to it for so long, it has seemed by far the most horrible method of judicial death. The condemned man, philosophically speaking, is more than executed. His arteries fountain after he is dead, and he goes into his coffin mutilated, his head under his arm, retribution having been carried out seemingly even on his corpse. He will remain both killed and mutilated until the
end of time. This is a heavy notion, and everyone who ever pondered the guillotine as a method of execution (condemned men in their cells have tended to ponder it a lot) has had to come to grips with it.

Another off-season treat was a visit to one of the
Marché aux puces
(Market of Fleas). The largest Paris flea market, open on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays, is on the edge of the city in a grimy, no-frills town called Saint-Ouen. On a Saturday morning, it attracts lovers of the second-hand, the rare, and the unusual. In October or November there are few tourists to clutter the stalls and few pickpockets, and normally taciturn dealers have more time to talk.

This Market of Fleas is the best-known market of its kind in the world, with more than three thousand separate stalls in various buildings, under tarpaulins, and along rambling alley-ways covered with tin roofs. There is china, porcelain, furniture, postcards, posters, lamps, rugs, silverware, toys, and
objets d'art
. There is, in short, little that cannot be unearthed here.

The market was founded in 1885, when the city fathers banished the junkmen and ragpickers of Paris to this neighborhood near Porte de Clignancourt, just beyond the Paris city limits. The “market of fleas” was no doubt an apt description of conditions at that time and for years after. It became a weekend market that took advantage of the large numbers of Parisians passing through Saint-Ouen to flee the city for a day in the country. Most of the dealers here are specialists and the chances of unearthing a Matisse are virtually nil. But there are savings of fifteen percent to twenty percent off city prices.

—Everett Potter, “Paris in Winter,”
Relax

CORI KENICER