English frock
coats and American cravats; ragged _sans-culottes_ in red caps, weave
in and out in ceaseless motion.

Do you know what was the chief distraction of this crowd in April,
1792? The debut of that new and fashionable machine, the guillotine.
It was used for the first time on the 25th, for a criminal guilty of
rape. Sensitive people congratulated each other on the mitigated
torment, which they were pleased to consider a humanitarian
improvement. The excellent philanthropist, Doctor Guillotin, was
lauded to the skies. His machine was named guillotine in his honor,
just as the stage-coaches established by Turgot had been called
turgotines.

What enthusiasm, what infatuation, for this guillotine, already so
famous and destined to be so much more so! The editors of the
_Moniteur_ declare in a lyric outburst that it is worthy of the
approaching century. The truth is that it accelerates and makes less
difficult the executioner's task. In the end the crowd would become
disgusted with massacres. The delays of the gibbet would weary their
patience. The _sans-culottes_, who doubtless have a presentiment of
all that is going to happen, welcome the guillotine, then, with
acclamations. At the _Ambigu_ theatre a ballet-pantomime, called _Les
Quatre Fils Aymon_, is given, and all Paris runs to {13} see the heads
of all four fall at once, in the midst of loud applause, under the
blade of the good doctor's machine. People amuse themselves with their
future instrument of torture as if it were a toy. In a Girondin salon
they play at guillotine with a moveable screen that is lifted and let
fall again. At elegant dinners a little guillotine is brought in with
the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places
a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is
decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something
red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which
every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would
make a vaudeville out of the day of judgment. Poor society, which
passes so quick from gay to grave, from lively to severe, and which,
like the Figaro of Beaumarchais, laughs at everything so that it may
not weep!

{14}

II.

COUNT DE FERSEN'S LAST JOURNEY TO PARIS.

It has been supposed until lately that after the day when he bade
farewell to the royal family at the beginning of the Varennes journey,
C