itical optimists.

The punishment of the guillotine certainly appears to be the most humane
mode of terminating the existence of a man that could possibly be invented.
The apparatus is preserved in the _Hotel de Ville_, and is never exposed to
view or erected on the place of execution, till about an hour before the
execution itself takes place. At the hour appointed the criminal is brought
to the scaffold, fastened to the board, placed at right angles with the
fatal instrument, the head protruding thro' the groove, which embraces the
neck; the executioner pulls a cord, the axe descends and the head of the
criminal falls into a basket. The whole ceremony of the execution does not
take three minutes when the criminal once arrives at the foot of the
guillotine. There is none of that horrible struggling that takes place in
the operation of hanging.

June 21st, 1816.

The ceremony of the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Berri passed off
quietly enough. Several people, it is true, were arrested for seditious
expressions, but no tumult occurred. A great apprehension seemed to prevail
lest something should occur, but the gendarmerie and police were so
vigilant that all projects, had there been any, would have proved abortive.

[59] Virgil, _Georg._, I, 35.--ED.

[60] Colonel Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle was the celebrated exposer of the scandal
in 1808-9, when the mistress of the Duke of York was found to be
trafficking in Commissions. He had retired from active service in
1802, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Financial reasons obliged
him, after 1815, to live on the Continent; he died in Florence,
1833.--ED.

[61] Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1779-1849), author of _The History of the
British Expedition to Egypt_, 1802; a French translation of that work
elicited a protest from Napoleon.--ED.

[62] Vanderberg had made a fortune as a contractor to the French army; he
is mentioned in Ida Saint Elme's _Memoires d'une contemporaine_ and
elsewhere.--ED.

[63] Abbe Sicard (Rooh Ambroise) was director of the Institution of
Sourds-Muets from 1790 to 1797 and from 1800 to 1822.--ED.

[64] Paul Didier (1758-1816) took part in a Bonapartist conspiracy at Lyons
in 1816, raised an insurrection in the Isere and fled to Piedmont,
whence he was surrendered to the French authorities, condemned to
death and executed at Grenoble.--ED.

[65] The King's brother, afterwards Charles X.--ED.