ing. Charles-Henri Sanson thought to take advantage of this
to carry out the final directions of the sentence. Her dress had been
torn in the struggles she had undergone, and her shoulder was uncovered.
He took an iron from the brazier, and, approaching her, he pressed it
upon the skin. Madame de la Motte uttered the cry of a wounded hyena,
and, throwing herself upon one of the assistants who held her, she bit
his hand with so much fury that she took out a portion of the flesh.
Then, and although tightly bound, she began again to defend herself.
Taking advantage of the care which the executioners exercised in this
struggle against a woman, she succeeded for a long time in paralyzing
all their attempts, and it was only very imperfectly that the iron was
applied a second time, to the other shoulder."

[Illustration: THE GUILLOTINE IN THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, FORMERLY THE
PLACE DE LA REVOLUTION, WHERE LOUIS XVI WAS BEHEADED, JANUARY 21, 1793.]

The red-hot iron slipped, and the brand was made on her breast instead.
"This time she uttered a cry more heart-rending and more terrible than
all the others, and fainted. They took advantage of this to put her in
a carriage and convey her to the Salpetriere."

Such was the administration of justice in the middle of the eighteenth
century, and in the most civilized capital in Christendom!

It is to be regretted that Destiny, with her usual disregard of sound
ethics, should have passed over the heads of the vainglorious Louis XIV
and the corrupt Louis XV to wreak the final vengeance due the Bourbons
on that of their well-intentioned but incapable successor. In the eyes
of Clio, weakness is the Unforgivable Sin. The grandson of Louis XV,
when he ascended the throne in 1774, at the age of twenty, was "a prince
of pure habits, of very limited intelligence, of an extreme timidity
both in character and speech, loving the good, desirous of it, but,
unfortunately, too feeble to be able to impose his will on those around
him. While he was still dauphin, being one day reproached by the
courtiers with his sober humor in the midst of the totally unregulated
court of his grandfather, he replied: 'I wish to be called Louis the
Severe.'" One day his minister, Turgot, entering his cabinet, found him
seriously occupied. "You see," the monarch said to him, "I am working
also." He was drawing up a memoir for the destruction of rabbits in the
neighborhood of cultivated estates!

The reforms instit