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task whose details I could not yet make out, but of whose basic nature I felt immediately certain.
In that year, and through much of the madness that followed through the next few orbits of the Earth, the
Parisian guillotine's victims were commonly hauled, after decapitation, to the cemetery of the Madeleine.
But in the year and month of which I speak, their numbers were increasing only gradually, and sometimes
whole days went by without a single accused aristocrat or traitor losing his or her head in the name of
Liberty.
I had been asleep for several days, oblivious to what was going on in the breathing, waking, workaday
world only a few yards from my hidden fastness. But my first sight of this new digging, the broad trench
ten feet deep, obviously intended for mass burials, stopped me in my tracks. Such excavation suggested
either an epidemic or the near approach of war. A faint odor of corruption was perceptible despite the
scientifically enlightened attempt at thorough burial.
Listening carefully, I could hear no cannon. That, I thought, suggested pestilence as the most probable
cause.
How little did I know.
I decided that a brief examination of whatever bodies had been buried in the trench would be the
quickest means of gaining the information that I sought. And indeed one glance, more or less over the
shoulders of the two women, was sufficient. They were all adults, and mostly men. Most were fully
clothed, though coats and hats were absent. And they were all without their heads; and I suddenly
understood just what kind of an epidemic had begun to ravage Paris.
The new government had adopted the guillotine in April of that year, the same month in which
Revolutionary France found herself at war with Austria and Prussia. The introduction of the new machine
was viewed as an idealistic gesture. Away with the hideous and prolonged tortures which in the past had
been the common means of capital punishment! The age of humanitarianism had arrived. No more would
those condemned to death be broken on the wheel, drawn and quartered, or have their flesh torn with
red-hot pincers modes of punishment still very much in style across the map of European civilization. In
France, simple beheading had formerly been reserved for aristocrats, but now everyone in the newly
classless society could enjoy its benefits.
Let me assure the modern reader that it is not my intention to single out the French as particularly brutal.
The last execution for witchcraft in England had occurred as late as 1685, when Jack Ketch, whose
name came to stand for all of his profession, hanged Alice Molland in Exeter.
In 1790 in England, the penalty of burning to death, inflicted for a variety of crimes, had finally been
abolished for women. And hanging, drawing, and quartering was still on the books as the prescribed
punishment for treason.
Also there is testimony that as late as 1790, the heads of executed traitors were still to be seen exhibited
on Temple Bar staring eyelessly in through the north windows of Tellson's Bank, which stood adjoining.
(One version has it that they were two officers of Prince Charles's army, decapitated in the old,
inefficient, and haphazard way, by the headsman's axe or sword; another, that they were veterans of the
Jacobite rebellion of 1715.)
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But let us return to that fateful night in 1792, in the cemetery of the Church of the Madeleine, the burial
ground of Revolutionary freedom. I was aware that the place was guarded, at least sporadically. The
sentries were under orders from the Committee of Public Safety, to prevent grieving relatives from
attempting to retrieve the mangled bodies of their loved ones. As one might expect, a little bribery
allowed such recoveries to take place fairly often the fewer bodies, the easier the gravediggers' task.
And, as it happened, no guards were anywhere in sight when my fateful meeting took place.
Still unaware of my presence, the two women kept working away under their bright light, right at the
place where the latest crop of bodies had been dumped. A new section of trench was dug almost every
day, laborious spade and shovel work. Then the section excavated on the previous day was filled in on
top of the latest crop of bodies then usually only two or three, sometimes as many as half a
dozen after they had been hurled carelessly into the pit and sprinkled with lime. Still, as I have already
remarked, there was only a trickle of dead flesh as yet, foreshadowing the floods to come; sometimes a
day passed without a single beheading.
The elder of the pair of workers, whose age I judged at a youthful thirty, was sitting on a chair or stool,
not knitting but holding a raw-necked head, a fine example of Sanson's handiwork, face uppermost in her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]