on the right.

On the 21st of September, 1791, the Assemblee had decreed that every
criminal condemned to death should be beheaded, and to facilitate the
execution of this law a Doctor Louis drew up a _memoire_ which he
presented to this body on the 20th of the following March, in which he
described an instrument of his own construction, and which, after
preliminary trials on animals and dead bodies, was finally adopted. Its
name was derived from a Doctor Guillotin who, on the 1st of September,
1789, demanded that the sufferings of those condemned to death should be
abridged by their execution with a species of machine that had been
formerly in use. "With my machine," he said, "I will strike off your
head in a twinkling, and without your suffering the slightest pain."
This phrase, which provoked the Assemblee to much laughter, was repeated
throughout Paris, and when a German mechanic, Schmidt, had constructed
on the plans of Doctor Louis an apparatus, it was immediately called
the _machine a Guillotin_, and presently, the guillotine. It was
inaugurated on the 25th of April, 1792, in the Place de Greve, upon the
person of a highway robber named Jacques Pelletier. "The novelty of the
execution increased greatly the number of those whom a barbarous pity
brought to view these sorrowful spectacles. This machine was preferred
with reason to the other methods of execution; it did not soil the hand
of a man with the blood of his fellow-creature."

The new instrument was put to such frequent use in the numerous
political executions that it soon acquired a great notoriety, the
prisoners jested concerning it, it was called the national razor, the
mill of silence, and there were some persons who wore in their ears
small representations of it. "In several of the hotels of Paris, those
aristocrats who could not succeed in emigrating killed time with a
little guillotine in mahogany which was brought on the table after
dessert; there were passed under its axe, successively, little figures
or dolls whose heads, made to resemble those of our best magistrates,
allowed to escape, as they fell, a reddish liquor resembling blood, from
the body, which was a flask. All the guests, especially the ladies,
hastened to dip their handkerchiefs in this blood, which proved to be a
very agreeable essence of ambergris."

The site of the present Place de la Concorde, in which the guillotine
was afterward set up, was embellished with a bronze equestria