Do you know what was the chief distraction of this crowd in April, 1792? The debut of that new and fashionable machine, the guillotine. It was used for the first time on the 25th, for a criminal guilty of rape. Sensitive people congratulated each other on the mitigated torment, which they were pleased to consider a humanitarian improvement. The excellent philanthropist, Doctor Guillotin, was lauded to the skies. His machine was named guillotine in his honor, just as the stage-coaches established by Turgot had been called turgotines.
What enthusiasm, what infatuation, for this guillotine, already so famous and destined to be so much more so! The editors of the _Moniteur_ declare in a lyric outburst that it is worthy of the approaching century. The truth is that it accelerates and makes less difficult the executioner's task. In the end the crowd would become disgusted with massacres. The delays of the gibbet would weary their patience. The _sans-culottes_, who doubtless have a presentiment of all that is going to happen, welcome the guillotine, then, with acclamations. At the _Ambigu_ theatre a ballet-pantomime, called _Les Quatre Fils Aymon_, is given, and all Paris runs to { 13} see the heads of all four fall at once, in the midst of loud applause, under the blade of the good doctor's machine. People amuse themselves with their future instrument of torture as if it were a toy. In a Girondin salon they play at guillotine with a moveable screen that is lifted and let fall again. At elegant dinners a little guillotine is brought in with the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would make a vaudeville out of the day of judgment. Poor society, which passes so quick from gay to grave, from lively to severe, and which, like the Figaro of Beaumarchais, laughs at everything so that it may not weep!
It has been supposed until lately that after the day when he bade farewell to the royal family at the beginning of the Varennes journey, Count de Fersen never again saw Marie Antoinette. A new publication of very great importance proves that this is an error, and that the Swedish nobleman came to Paris for the last time in 1792, and had several interviews with the King and Queen. This publication is entitled: _Extraits des papiers du grand maréchal de Suède, Comte Jean Axel de Fersen_, and is published by his great-nephew, Baron de Kinckowstrom, a Swedish colonel. There is something romantic in this episode of the mysterious journey made by Marie Antoinette's loyal chevalier, which merits to leave a trace in history.