Chapter XXV: Part III (19)

The last personage we shall record here as a fit companion to all the before-mentioned, is SANSON, the renowned HERO OF THE GUILLOTINE. On the outskirts of old Paris, in a small neat cottage overlooking the banks of the Seine, surrounded by palings at the front, and thick hawthorn hedges at the sides and back, lives secluded from vulgar gaze a descendant of three generations of the Sansons, who from father to son have inherited the office of public executioner. He is a grim-looking old man of strong build; and is complacent to all visitors whose curiosity leads them to see and converse with him, and view his curious cabinet of murderers’ relics and criminals’ curiosities; and who make their request with becoming civility. He is full of anecdotes about the exploits of his ancestors at chopping off the heads of Louis the XVI, Maria Antonette, Charlotte Corday, the authoress of the famous saying “O! liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name,” as she was about to put her neck under the guillotine knife. He will exhibit at the same time, models of guillotines, instruments of torture, amongst them spokes of the blood-stained breaking wheel of former days, locks of the hair of various nobles and their ladies, rings, brooches, and other trinkets of the victims of the bloody Robespierre, with pieces of the robes and surplices of the bishops and priests who were then brought out of dungeons and guillotined in multitudes early every morning for weeks together, till the ground where the scaffold stood ran with blood. A few skulls and finger-bones of remarkable persons he will also show, and tell how he obtained them. We will now spare our reader’s feelings, and conclude by hoping that the day is not far off, when the awful adventures of the heroes of the gallows and guillotine will be numbered among the things of the past.

THE END.

ELLIOT, Printer, “The West-End News” office, 475, Oxford Street, W.C.

End of Project Gutenberg's Curiosities of Street Literature, by Various