Page:History of the Guillotine.djvu/74

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M. VERNEUIL'S STATEMENT.
59

mistake. M. du Bois states also that Durosoi's name was really De Rosoy; and we find that Peltier, who knew him well, so calls him; as does Deschiens in his 'Bibliographic des Journaux,' under the title of his Journal, 'Gazette de France;' but he was certainly condemned and executed as Durosoi, and so the name has passed into all the biographies, and into such of the histories as deign to mention such trifling details. We admit that, amidst the gigantic horrors of those scenes, such small circumstantial mistakes may appear entitled to little regard; but they appear to us worthy of this passing notice as indicative of the laxity and indifference with which these legal murders were conducted, witnessed, and recorded. We find in the 'Souvenirs de Soixante-treize Ans,' by M. Verneuil, a member of the Assembly, the following passage relative to these executions, which, we think, in so great a dearth of contemporaneous information, worth quoting, particularly as the book, which seems to have been only printed in a country town (Limoges), is little known:—

"After the 10th August they had organised an extraordinary tribunal for judging the pretended conspirators of that day. The first[1] victim was a literary man, editor of a Royalist journal: he was executed in my neighbourhood—Place du Carrousel. I was invited to go into a house

  1. Here was a member of the Assembly—and of the Committee which had decided the adoption of the guillotine—resident close to the place of execution, who thought that Durosoi was the first victim of the tribunal, though Dangremont had been executed four days previous.