Page:History of the Guillotine.djvu/95

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80
ESSAY ON THE GUILLOTINE.

but five days in the Place St. Antoine, for the shopkeepers even of that patriotic quarter did not like their new neighbour; and so, after having in these five days executed ninety-six persons, it was removed still further to the Barrière du Trône, or, as it was called in the absurd nomenclature of the day, Barrière Renversée.

There it stood from the 9th of June to the fall of Robespierre, 9th Thermidor (27th July, 1794). So say all the authorities; but an incident in the trial of Fouquier-Tinville seems to prove that, in the early part of July at least, the scaffold stood in the Place de la Révolution, and that the instrument was dismounted every evening. A lady, the Marquise de Feuquières, was to be tried on the 1st of July: the whole evidence against her was a document which had been placed under the seals of the law at her country-house, near Versailles, and Fouquier sent off the night before a special messenger to bring it up; the messenger was delayed by the local authorities, and could not get back to Paris till half-past four on the evening of the 1st, when, " on arriving at the Place de la Révolution, he found the executioner dismounting the engine, and was informed that the Marquise de Feuquières had been guillotined an hour before"—having been tried and condemned without a tittle of any kind of evidence; and this fact, attested by his own messenger, Fouquier could not deny—though we cannot reconcile it with the other evidence as to the locality of the guillotine at that particular period. In all the lists des Condamnés