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Guillotine   Listen
noun
Guillotine  n.  
1.
A machine for beheading a person by one stroke of a heavy ax or blade, which slides in vertical guides, is raised by a cord, and let fall upon the neck of the victim.
2.
Any machine or instrument for cutting or shearing, resembling in its action a guillotine.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Guillotine" Quotes from Famous Books



... who is going to buy your pictures, Henri?" Cuthbert said, quietly. "As soon as the reds get the upper hand we shall have the guillotine at work, and the first heads to fall will be those of your best customers. You don't suppose the ruffians of Belleville are going to become patrons of art. For my part I would rather fight against the savages than level my rifle against the honest German lads who are led here against us. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... of terror- stricken legend,—were now brought forth to view. Headsmen's axes, with the rust of noble and royal blood upon them, and a vast collection of halters that had choked the breath of plebeian victims, were thrown in together. A shout greeted the arrival of the guillotine, which was thrust forward on the same wheels that had borne it from one to another of the bloodstained streets of Paris. But the loudest roar of applause went up, telling the distant sky of the triumph of the earth's redemption, when ...
— Earth's Holocaust (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... advocate of Toulouse, called "The Anacreon of the Guillotine." He was president of the Convention, a member of the Constitutional Committee, and chief agent in the condemnation to death of Louis XVI. As member of the Committee of Public Safety, he decreed that "Terror must be the order of the day." In the first empire Barere bore no public ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the judges. Even in 1880 there existed (and I presume there still exists) a certain 'liberty of the Savoy,' under the shadow of the new courts of justice, which can deal with keepers of disorderly ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... reformer, at once courageous and wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, and that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... sight, however, which it fell to my lot to witness at Brussels in this second and short visit, was neither gay nor handsome, nor dear in any sense, but the very reverse; it being that of the punishment of the guillotine inflicted on a wretched murderer, named John Baptist Michel.[2] Hearing, at the moment of my arrival, that this tragical scene was on the point of being acted in the great square of the market-place, I determined for once to make a sacrifice of my feelings to the desire of being present at a spectacle, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... this bill any sooner." And within myself I said—"Pay the price of your luxury, pay for your name, pay for your ease, pay for the monopoly which you enjoy! The rich have invented judges and courts of law to secure their goods, and the guillotine—that candle in which so many lie in silk, under silken coverlets, there is remorse, and grinding of teeth beneath a smile, and those fantastical lions' jaws are gaping to set their fangs in ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... Maria Antoinette, then but fifteen years of age, and marvelously beautiful, was married to the young dauphin of France, subsequently the unhappy Louis XVI. As she left Vienna, for that throne from which she was to descend to the guillotine, her mother sent by her hand the following letter to ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... enraged and lawless mob. She and her two daughters, then about fifteen and twelve, were cast into prison in Paris. The family estates were confiscated, and most of his particular friends fell by the stroke of the guillotine. In this agonizing condition, she maintained the most wonderful fortitude and patience; without uncommon firmness and sincere trust in providence, she must have sunk under such deep and complicated distress. While she was in prison, she was often found in a retired ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... what France had of the best and noblest in name, in lineage, in chivalry, in that year of grace 1783. The storm-cloud which a few years hence was destined to break over their heads, sweeping them from their palaces to the prison and the guillotine, was only gathering very slowly in the dim horizon of squalid, starving Paris: for the next half-dozen years they would still dance and gamble, fight and flirt, surround a tottering throne, and hoodwink a weak monarch. The Fates' avenging sword still rested in its sheath; the relentless, ceaseless ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... make, on which, in words of gold, Shall be inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes his hands ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)

... "Marseillaise" bring up! The "Carillon" had been Marie Antoinette's favorite tune: it pursued her from her palace to her prison, startled her on her way to her trial, and was probably the last sound she heard as she lay bound under the guillotine. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... the spring of 1837 that Carlyle's first great historical work appeared, "The French Revolution:—Vol. I., The Bastile; Vol. II, The Constitution; Vol. III., The Guillotine." The publication of this book produced a profound impression on the public mind. A history abounding in vivid and graphic descriptions, it was at the same time a gorgeous "prose epic." It is perhaps the most readable of all Carlyle's works, and indeed is one ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle

... forward. Above the clenched fists of the soldiers that ran to meet him, the eyes of Anfossi were turned toward her. His face was expressionless. His eyes neither accused nor reproached. And with the joy of one who has looked upon and then escaped the guillotine, Marie ran down the steps to the waiting automobile. With a pretty cry of pleasure she leaped into the seat beside Thierry. Gayly she threw out her arms. "To Paris!" she commanded. The handsome eyes of Thierry, eloquent with admiration, ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis

... depths revealed in the correspondence of Dumouriez with Pache. In truth, both Powers began the war very badly; but France repaired her faults far more quickly, chiefly because the young democracy soon came to award the guillotine for incompetent conduct over which the nepotism of Whitehall spread a decent cloak. The discovery by the Jacobins of the law of the survival of the fittest served to array the military genius of France ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... Danton family. The great tribune left two little sons, George and Antoine, who grew up and resided in their ancestral home, hiding themselves from the world. Their young step-mother it was whose memory, when on the way to the guillotine, evoked from Danton the only betrayal of personal emotion throughout his stormy career: "Must I leave thee for ever, my beloved," then, quickly recovering himself, ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... thunders!" cried Skeleton. "I wish all the nobs could hear us talk, who think to make us quake before the guillotine. They have only to come to the Barriere Saint Jacques the day of my benefit; they will hear me crack jokes with the crowd, and say to Jack, in a bold voice, 'Open the door till I go down into the cellar!' Renewed laughter followed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... trampling on every right, and sporting with life as the essence of liberty; and the few who conceived freedom to be a plant which did not flourish the better for being nourished with human blood, and who ventured to disapprove the ravages of the guillotine, were execrated as the tools of the coalesced despots, and as persons who, to weaken the affection of America for France, became the calumniators of that republic. Already had an imitative spirit, captivated with the splendor, but copying the errors, of a great nation, reared up in ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... quite of your opinion. And I should be very sorry," he added wickedly, "to make things seem blacker to you than they already do. But you see we have had a revolution against the nobility; we shall have one against wealth. Great names have been abolished by the guillotine, and great fortunes will be done away with next. A man was considered guilty if his name happened to be M. de Montmorency; it will be criminal to be M. Two Thousand Pounds a Year. Things are certainly ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... under the razor!" she exclaimed, meaning the guillotine. "He tried to drown me, the assassin! Yes, I know him for an assassin,—a murderer! It was he who ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray

... chivalry of France and gleaming like a star in the most splendid court of Europe. And then there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her despised, insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more fiendish women; until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to the guillotine, where her head is severed from her body and her corpse is cast ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... in the Place de la Revolution, he is brought to the guillotine; beside him, brave Abbe Edgeworth says, "Son of St. Louis, ascend to Heaven"; the axe clanks down; a king's life is shorn away. At home, this killing of a king has divided all friends; abroad it has united all enemies. England declares war; Spain declares war; they ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... my infinite degradation until the guillotine should have dispatched its business in arrear, I found much to my advantage. The man who expects nothing, cannot be hurt by disappointment; and when I was conducted from my solitary cell into the midst of four or five hundred prisoners, I felt the human feelings kindle in me, which had been ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... as a remedy for smallpox; but just at that time the great churchmen had other things to think of besides crushing this particular heretic: they were too much occupied in keeping their own heads from the guillotine to give attention to what was passing in the head of Pinel. He was allowed to work in peace, and in a short time the reign of diabolism at Bicetre was ended. What the exorcisms and fetiches and prayers and processions, and drinking ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... Guillotin, who gave his name to the guillotine, the terrible knife with which people were beheaded in thousands during the French Revolution. Guillotin did not really invent it, nor was he himself guillotined, as has often been said. The guillotine is supposed to have been invented long ago in Persia, and was used in the Middle Ages both in Italy and Germany. The Frenchman whose name it bears was a kindly person, who merely advised this method of execution at the time of the French Revolution, because he thought, ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill

... some rascal or other in a hole of a place where the Government will fling you a thousand francs a year like the scraps that are thrown to the butcher's dog. Bark at thieves, plead the cause of the rich, send men of heart to the guillotine, that is your work! Many thanks! If you have no influence, you may rot in your provincial tribunal. At thirty you will be a Justice with twelve hundred francs a year (if you have not flung off the gown for good before then). By the time you ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac

... victims here sacrificed —Execution of the King and Queen, Philippe Egalite, Charlotte Corday, Madame Roland, Robespiere, cum multus aliis —Unexampled dispatch introduced in putting persons to death by means of the guillotine—Guillotin, the inventor or improver of this instrument, dies of grief—Little impression left on the mind of the spectators of these sanguinary scenes—Lord Cornwallis arrives ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... began to descend upon my head and shoulders, and cover the work I was engaged on. I started up, and looking up at my big sunlight, saw to my horror that I had wound up my easel, which is twelve feet high, and more nearly resembles a guillotine than anything else, so far that the top of it was in immediate contact with ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... him, had lost himself in pursuing his Rose, and how he had lost the Rose, too, waking up at last to the dull memory of pain and sorrow and death, that "tout porrist." The world had still a long march to make from the Rose of Queen Blanche to the guillotine of Madame du Barry; but the "Roman de la Rose" made epoch. For the first time since Constantine proclaimed the reign of Christ, a thousand years, or so, before Philip the Fair dethroned Him, the deepest expression of social feeling ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... Sanselme, who avowed everything except that Jane was his daughter. He would not have admitted this had he been threatened with the guillotine. Fanfar listened attentively. ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina

... aperture, where, with faces to the wall, they stood tense and rigid, listening while the steps came nearer and nearer. They waited in the darkness, as men in the Bonnet Rouge days must have waited for the stroke of Madame Guillotine. ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew

... to one, were practical masters of the island; and Don Chacon, whenever he did anything unpopular, had to submit to 'manifestations,' with tricolour flag, Marseillaise, and Ca Ira, about the streets of Port of Spain; and to be privately informed by Admiral Artizabal that a guillotine was getting ready to cut off the heads of all loyal Spaniards, French, and British. This may have been an exaggeration: but wild deeds were possible enough in those wild days. Artizabal, the story goes, threatened to hang ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... that half-stunned misery written clear in lips and eyes, she must, he knew, have reached the outmost border of endurance. Karyl bent solicitously forward and spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly. It was all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to her coronation. As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine. Benton gripped the iron bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his. For a moment her pupils dilated and ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... introduced into the Occident by them. During the first five centuries Christians felt an unconquerable repugnance to the representation of the Saviour of the world nailed to an instrument of punishment more infamous than the guillotine of to-day. The Syrians were the first to substitute reality in all its pathetic horror for ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... his jaw, and is now in a precarious state. Our Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Critic, Deputy Assistant Sub-Critic, and a few extra Supernumerary Critics, then went in a body and looked at this young woman's head, apparently taken after an interview with Madame Guillotine. They looked at the head from all sides, and finally stood on their own, but they could not make head or tail of it. Any person giving information as to the meaning, and paying threepence, will receive a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various

... Council House. The divines who attended the prisoner were not of his own persuasion; but he listened to them with civility, and exhorted them to caution their flocks against those doctrines which all Protestant churches unite in condemning. He mounted the scaffold, where the rude old guillotine of Scotland, called the Maiden, awaited him, and addressed the people in a speech, tinctured with the peculiar phraseology of his sect, but breathing the spirit of serene piety. His enemies, he said, he forgave, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... ministry—call it what name you will—given positive, indubitable signs of want and absence of foresight, as did ours in these Virginia, Norfolk, and Harper's Ferry affairs? Not this or that minister or secretary, but all of them ought to go to the constitutional guillotine. Blindness—no mere short-sightedness—permeates the whole administration, Blair excepted. And Scott, the politico-military adviser of the President! What is the matter with Scott, or were the halo and incense surrounding him based on bosh? Will it be one more ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... opinions of man- made creeds were persecuted and anathematized. The church formed a league with worldly rulers and used the strong arm of the law to crush those who would not accept its human standards of orthodoxy. The Inquisition, with the dungeon, stocks, guillotine and other diabolical means of torture, was called into requisition. It is claimed that no less than fifty million human beings were martyred in this effort of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, calling itself the church, to maintain unity on a human creed. ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... and he was gone, I opened the staircase window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... "Yes, to-morrow the guillotine falls," he answered. "To-night we dance in each other's arms. Immemorial tableau. Laughter, love, and song against the perfect background—death. Let's not cheat ourselves by being sad. To-morrow will be ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... sir, that you are torturing me frightfully, pitilessly! I am an innocent man, and you are trying to deprive me of my life. You have been turning me this way and that way for so many hours that I begin to feel as if I were standing on the guillotine. Each time I open my mouth to speak I ask myself, is it this answer that will send me to the scaffold? My anxiety and dismay surprise you, do they? Why, since this examination began, I've felt the cold knife graze my neck at least twenty times. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau

... dull hair as she laid her head on the crude kitchen table and sobbed. Mechanically, back and forth, back and forth, his hand passed over her dear, comfortable head, while he listened, even as, on the stairs to the guillotine, a gallant gentleman of old France ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... sentence, it was a refusal of justice. Poor poet! a deadly cold seized on him when he saw de Marsay eying him through his glass; and when the Parisian lion let that optical instrument fall, it dropped in so singular a fashion that Lucien thought of the knife-blade of the guillotine. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... Guillaume Guizot, French historian and statesman, was born of Huguenot parents at Nimes on October 4, 1787. The liberal opinions of his family did not save his father from the guillotine in 1794, and the mother fled to Geneva, where Guizot was educated. He went to Paris in the later days of the Empire, and engaged himself at once in literature and politics. His lectures on the History of Civilisation ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... movement was a giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... teeth the gusts of lead and iron that were to smite them at their first movement in obedience to that word. The word was not given; the tempest did not break out. The delay was hideous, maddening! It unnerved like a respite at the guillotine. ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... noble families, entertaining them at secret meetings of the Chiffonne, where oaths were taken; later again, defending itself behind barricades of paving-stones; last of all, marched or carried in batches to the guillotine or the fusillade. He told of Avignon and its Papal Castle overhanging the Rhone, the city where he had spent his school days, and at the age of nine had seen Patriot L'Escuyer stabbed to death in the Cordeliers' ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... did not kill my son. It was a murderer that I had with me, a murderer for whom the police were hunting and for whom the guillotine was waiting!" ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... Emotions—lib. II, c. XI) the shrug is a poor foundation upon which to build so important a theory, for previously to the Revolution the gesture was unknown. I have not a doubt that it is directly referable to the terror inspired by the guillotine during the period of that ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... oft-quoted words, "The tree of Liberty thrives only when watered by the blood of tyrants;" escaped the fate of his associates; became a spy under Napoleon; was called by Burke, from his flowery oratory, the Anacreon of the Guillotine, and by Mercier, "the greatest liar in France;" he was inventor of the famous fable "his masterpiece," of the "Sinking of the Vengeur," "the largest, most inspiring piece of blaque manufactured, for some centuries, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... vengeance were uttered, loud and deep, through the streets of Paris. His enemies in the Assembly took advantage of this to bring an act of accusation against him, which would relieve them of his presence by the decisive energy of the ax of the guillotine. Robespierre's danger was most imminent, and he was obliged to conceal himself. Madame Roland, inspired by those courageous impulses which ever ennobled her, went at midnight, accompanied by her husband, to his retreat, to invite him to a more secure asylum ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... the third test tube slip through my fingers and shatter on the lab bench, I gave it up. How would you have acted if you had gotten that kind of news? That first gut-twisting admission that you really may be a snake! Then sharp awareness of what it means. A guillotine couldn't cut you off more sharply from Normal humanity. But the spirit struggles and refuses to accept it. You ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett

... from without. Then, instead of giving the financial body a little griping in its gold-lined tummy, which is only the salutary effect of purging, a surgical operation will be required. It will be something like one they performed on the body politic of France not so long ago. Old Dr. Guillotine officiated. It was quite a successful operation, though ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... to stand aside for further inquiry; a command which sent the blood out of the cheeks of him who heard it, and made him think no more of the mail-coach but of the low tumbrel on which the victims of the guillotine took ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... over a basement set apart for the use of persons in need of bad servants and servants in search of worse places—appeared such a collection of distorted human faces that a general execution by the guillotine seemed to have been going on, with all the heads hung up against the glass to dry. The ghastly faces were, in fact, those of papier-mache masks, waiting for customers desirous of a certain amount of personal disfigurement, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... I do feel horribly about it, and really and truly, without exaggeration, I would have died sooner than repay her kindness to me by giving her away like this. An ancestress of yours in the Revolution ran up the steps of the guillotine laughing and kissing her hands to the friends she left in the tumbril, and I could have been almost half as brave if by so doing I might have avoided this dreadful abandoning of Ellaline's interests, trusted to me. But what can you do between two evils? Isn't it a law of nature, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... friend, a literary confidante, and an inspiration? Mme. de Beaumont—the daughter of Montmorin, who had been a colleague of Necker in the ministry—had been forsaken by a worthless husband, had seen father, mother, brother, perish by the guillotine, and her sister escape it only by losing her reason, and then her life, before the fatal day. She, too, had been arrested with the others, but was so ill and weak that she was left to die by the roadside en route to Paris—a fate from which she was saved by ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... laughing Vaubernier forsee the day when, as Madame du Barry, she would reign as Dame du Palais, after the death of La Pompadour. Still less could she imagine that in her old age, in the next reign, she would be dragged to the guillotine, filling the streets of Paris with her shrieks, heard above the howlings of the mob of the Revolution: "Give me life! life! for my repentance! Life! to devote it to the Republic! Life! for the surrender of all my wealth to the nation!" And death, not life, was given in answer ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... in the French Revolution who shaved each other out of the fragments of bomb shells, and wore ghastly trophies from the guillotine. But short of a Reign of Terror, making all men mad, one does not expect such things. Few people (I fancy) if they knew it, would care to use the glass from which some poor wretch had drunk his draught of poison; and even to touch the murderer's knife stored up in a public ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner

... Each of these parties in succession rests upon its more advanced element. So soon as it has carried the revolution far enough not to be able to keep pace with, much less march ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its more daring allies, who stand behind it, and it is sent to the guillotine. Thus the revolution moves ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx

... whirlwind of cheers. At Lyons, the Comte d'Artois and Macdonald seek safety in flight; and soldiers and workmen welcome their chief with wild acclaim; but amidst the wonted cries are heard threats of "The Bourbons to the guillotine," "Down with ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... their monument and did proper reverence to them. They were moderate idealists who rose during the first year of the revolution; we thought them much like the Bull Moosers. So we did what homage we could to the Girondists who were run over by the revolutionary band wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Terror. For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the knife had bitten many times. So we stood before what seemed to be the proper monument with sympathetic eyes and uncovered heads for a second before ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White

... been drunk," thought he; "that woman must have intoxicated me with caresses. Good heavens! I was a fool and mad! I risked the guillotine in a business like that. Fortunately it passed off all right. But if it had to be done again, I ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... differed from them, and had adhered to the cause of the mother land, had their property confiscated, and were expelled from the country. Revolutions have ever been marked by cruelty. Liberty in France inaugurated the guillotine. The fathers of the American Revolution cast out their kindred, who found a refuge in the wilderness of Canada, where they endured for a time the most severe privations and hardships. This was the first illustration or definition of "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... platform of the guillotine, already stained with the blood of Bernard, Lesurques exclaimed, "I pardon my judges; I pardon the witnesses through whose error I die; and I pardon Legrand, who has not a little contributed to my judicial assassination. I die protesting my innocence." In another instant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... in are enough of themselves to sadden any man's face. In the Reign of Terror no living being in all the city of Paris can rise in the morning and be certain of escaping the spy, the denunciation, the arrest, or the guillotine, before night. Such times are trying enough to oppress any man's spirits; but Lomaque is not thinking of them or caring for them now. Out of a mass of papers which lie before him on his old writing-table, he has just taken up and read one, which has carried ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... the Guilty their calm mien Which damns the crowd around the guillotine. Satan, at last take pity on ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker

... Mary Virginia looked at him with eyes in which the shadow of fear was deepening. Hard as nails, cold as ice, to him she was merely a means to an end. He did not even hate her. The guillotine does not hate those whom it decapitates, either; none the less it takes off their heads once they get in the way of the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... off by making some unflattering guesses as to my past career, commented forcibly on my present mode of life, ventured a few cheerful prophecies as to my hereafter and polished off a brisk ten minutes heart-to-heart talk by snapping her fingers under my nose and threatening me with the guillotine if I did not instantly remove my man-eating ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various

... weakness would reveal itself as extraordinary power. Under the early emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their lips. But you ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

... of intrigue I allowed to Mr. Robert Carruthers another of very delightful gayety with all of the "chiffon pinafore" ladies upon the ballroom floor. I have in my blood that gayety which led some of my ancestors to laugh and compliment each other and play piquet up even to the edge of the guillotine, and I refused to see the countenance of my Uncle, the General Robert, regarding me from the door in the end of the ballroom. I considered that an hour of pleasure was a sacred thing not to be interfered with, ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess

... Guillotine, revised from the Quarterly Review, by the Right Hon. J. W. Croker, which forms the new part of Murray's Railway {456} Reading, is not only valuable as a precis of all that is known upon this very obscure subject, but for all its illustration of the difficulty ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various

... The nurse was at the same time condemned to be burnt alive, and suffered her sentence accordingly; but Lady Warriston, in respect of her gentle descent, was appointed to die by the Maiden, a sort of rude guillotine, imported, it is said, from Halifax, by the Earl of Morton, while regent, who was himself the first ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various

... slaughter, massacre, butcher, murder, assassinate, execute, hang, electrocute, guillotine, lynch, despatch, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definite pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. "The Royal George" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... that they as a class dictated to their patronesses in despite of fashion. The French Revolution had somewhat to do with the change; a powdered head or wig was a token of aristocracy, and as the fashion might lead to the guillotine, sensible people discarded it long before the English legislature put a tax upon its use. With reference to this Sir Walter Scott says, in the fifth chapter of "The Antiquary:" "Regular were the Antiquary's inquiries at an old-fashioned barber, who dressed ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews

... Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... ago I witnessed in Paris a man's head cut off by the guillotine in the presence of thousands of spectators. I knew that the man was a horrible criminal. I was acquainted with all the arguments which people have been devising for so many centuries, in order to justify this sort of deed. I knew that they had done this expressly, deliberately. ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi

... there in his squalid, tattered dress, with rough, matted hair, and face flushed by recent intemperance, and flecked with livid stains of past debauches. You may see many such crowding round the guillotine or the tumbrel in pictures ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence

... suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... age of black silence, and then there was a crowded hour of glorious life. When I heard the shouts and then the shots I tried to remember Sydney Carton and the French aristocrats taking snuff on the steps of the guillotine, and I tried to think of something handsome and dressy in the way of a farewell speech, in case it might ever be reported in the States. The C.E. was splendid, only, when the great doors clanged open and the mob streamed in calling wildly for Emilio Hernandez, he very naturally failed to hold ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... crisis would have been quite as incapable of such imaginative independence as Keats and Coleridge would have been incapable of winning the battle of Wattignies. In Paris the tree of liberty was a garden tree, clipped very correctly; and Robespierre used the razor more regularly than the guillotine. Danton, who knew and admired English literature, would have cursed freely over Kubla Khan; and if the Committee of Public Safety had not already executed Shelley as an aristocrat, they would certainly ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... really go too far; you even threaten me with the guillotine," exclaimed the king, good-naturedly. "Indeed, I am afraid I must have committed a great crime against etiquette. Tell me, therefore, where you wish to see a change, and I pledge you my word I shall grant your request if it be in my power to ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... After leaving Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, where he resided for seventeen years, made a fortune in speculations, and became imbued with French principles, writing a song in praise of the Guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old friends at home. In 1805 he returned to America, and built a fine residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Barlow's literary fame, in his own generation, rested ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... Aunt Mary, in a magnificent hotel in the fine square, formerly Place Louis Quinze, afterwards Place de la Revolution, and now Place de la Concorde. Here the guillotine was once at work night and day; and here died Louis Seize, and Marie Antoinette, and Madame Roland: opposite to us is the Seine and La Lanterne. On one side of this ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... stoical than the truth, if we said he was unmoved. So far from this, his moments were bitter, and his anguish would have been extreme, were it not for a high resolution which prompted him to die, as he fancied it, like un Francais. The numerous executions by the guillotine had brought fortitude under such circumstances into a sort of fashion, and there were few who did not meet death with decorum. With our prisoner, however, it was still different; for, sustained by a dauntless spirit, he would have faced the great ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... do well to return hither, by which time I suppose La Margaretta will arrive. Yesterday evening Sir Roger Curtis landed from the Phaeton. He left Lord Howe on the 4th. I know not the particulars, but there has been a general action; and I think Monsieur Jean Bon L'Andre and his Guillotine have had a thorough drubbing. We have lost very few officers of rank. Lord Howe is perfectly well, of which I give ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross

... of the Revolution. To him the victory of the tricolor meant the resurrection of Montagne, which this time should surely bring the nobility down to the dust by means more certain than that of the guillotine, because less violent. The peerage without heredity; the National Guard, which puts on the same camp-bed the corner grocer and the marquis; the abolition of the entails demanded by a bourgeois lawyer; the Catholic Church deprived of its supremacy; ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac

... d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the guillotine, drew the King on with her, and plunged the world into crimes and calamities which will forever stain ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... several others. He seems not to have felt much gratification in murdering them, but to have been so utterly indifferent to their sufferings, that he killed them solely for the sake of their clothes, which were of the poorest description. He was sentenced to the guillotine, and executed in ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... directly or in their ancestors had ruled England since 1688, had enjoyed power without responsibility, and privilege which alike Kings and mobs had questioned in vain—were filled with the wildest alarms. Emotional orators saw visions of the guillotine; calmer spirits anticipated the ballot-box; and the one implement of anarchy was scarcely more dreaded ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... horses, and an army of troops, with all the most formidable enginery of war, preceded, surrounded, and followed his carriage. They reached the Place de la Revolution at twenty minutes past ten o'clock. An immense crowd filled the place, above which towered the guillotine. With a firm tread he ascended the steps of the scaffold, looked for a moment on the keen and polished edge of the axe, and then, turning to the vast throng, said, in a voice clear and untremulous, "People, ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head

... royalty, would have its Whigs and its Tories, but that it was forever rid of Republicans and Imperialists. At the accession of Charles X. the word Republican, become a synonym of Jacobin, awoke only memories of the guillotine and the "Terror." A moderate republic seemed but a chimera; only that of Robespierre and Marat was thought of. The eagle was no longer mentioned; and as to the eaglet, he was a prisoner at Vienna. What ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... brought him in guilty of a foul murder and he was guillotined—gentleman and artist of merit though he was. They were kind to his young son; his friends made up a purse and sent him afar to be educated and reared in ignorance. But the shadow of the guillotine is projected afar, and I saw its red finger point to the assassin's offspring. I have found him. If my hand is not too feeble to ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... of history, by the experience of 1893. Mr. Gladstone used every power he possessed, and used it unscrupulously, to drive a Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons. He was a man trained in the historical traditions of Parliament. He assuredly did not relish the use of the closure and the guillotine. He was supported in the Commons by a very narrow majority, never I think exceeding forty-eight, and often falling below that number. The power of the party system, or as Americans say, the "Machine," was admittedly much less in 1893 than it has become in 1911. Yet Mr. Gladstone used such ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... be else, old friend? By St. Guillotine!" he added, clapping the Deputy on the back, "you shall come to my room, and we will broach a ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... accomplished. Her long familiarity with the movements of this stupendous enginery of death enabled her to calculate to a nicety when the crash would come. She lay like the bound victim under the guillotine, watching fer ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... Place de la Revolution in 1792, (when the guillotine was erected here), is at the east end of Champs Elysees, adjoining the Jardin des Tuileries. The square is enclosed with balustrades, upon which stand eight colossal statues of the chief provincial cities. In the center of it stands the Obelish of Luxor. This magnificent ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner

... connection with the men whom he maligned. He lived to be old, as, oddly enough, Spite so often does. In the Terror he had a narrow escape, for he was brought before Chaumette. Chaumette apostrophised the assailant of Rousseau and Diderot with rude energy, but did not send him to the guillotine. In this the practical disciple only imitated the magnanimity of his theoretical masters. Rousseau had declined an opportunity of punishing Palissot's impertinences, and Diderot took no worse vengeance upon him than by making an occasional reference of contempt to him in a dialogue which he perhaps ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... here stood the Altar of Freedom; And though neither marble nor gilding Was used in those days to adorn Our simple republican building, Corbleu! but the MERE GUILLOTINE Cared little for splendor or show, So you gave her an axe and a beam, And a plank and ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray

... fear for a lifetime, and who had been learning to drop resistances in other ways, was once brought face to face with the necessity for going to the dentist, and the old fear was at once aroused,—something like the feeling one might have in preparing for the guillotine,—and she suffered from it a day or two before she remembered her new principles. Then, when the new ideas came back to her mind, she at once applied them and said, "Yes, I am afraid, I am awfully afraid. I am perfectly willing to be afraid," ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call

... axe, bone bracelets, a coin of the Hundred Years' War, and lastly a little pin- cushion of cloth in the shape of a heart, ornamented with metal crosses, the relic of some refugee in the Reign of Terror, hiding to escape the guillotine. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... would have liked it to be well given; it is quite possible, had she lived at the time, she would have been one of those who objected to the indignity of riding in the tumbrils quite as much as to the guillotine at the ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... the end. She was removed to the Conciergerie, the antechamber of the guillotine. A constitutional priest was sent to her, but she dismissed him with thanks, not requiring his ministrations. She preferred the painter Hauer, who had received the Revolutionary Tribunal's permission to paint her portrait in accordance ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... Brigitte, as she undressed her mistress, "must that man sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, and put on Monsieur Auguste's slippers, and eat the pate I made for Monsieur Auguste? They may guillotine me if I—" ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac

... utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar—a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand—to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... has served its purpose, which was to guillotine and drive out most of the revolutionary workers from the party. The Constitution committee recommended that it be striken out by unanimous consent without going on the minutes or records. Ruthenberg opposed. He insisted that it be struck ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto

... would cost me herself forever! She had done that exquisitely well, as she did everything, not even advising me that I was to be her errand boy on such an errand, trusting me to find out by accident, as I had, that I was to be my own executioner, was to spring my own guillotine. She knew that, none the less, though I understood what the letter meant thus addressed, I sacredly must execute her silent trust. Oh! Helena, yours was indeed an exquisite revenge for that one hour of a dour man's ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough

... and strange— This blank and sudden change Men have known ever? This veil as hard and keen As the blade of a guillotine Flashing ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet

... and a gentleman. Even the victims of the First French Revolution were permitted to express in song through the bars of the Temple sentiments of utter scorn for their enemies, and when the Jacobins in their turn marched to the guillotine they ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... XVI, at the time of the French Revolution, was that the royal family lived on the costliest delicacies while many of the common people were actually starving. They thought that was the chief crime to be expiated at the guillotine. ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... cause of Christ, another king was dragged forth from the gates of his Renaissance palace,[27] to die, by the hands of the thousands of his people gathered in another crusade; or what shall that be called—whose sign was not the cross, but the guillotine?" ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin

... the Queen of France, entreating her not to compromise, and to "trust to the support of foreign armies" ("Histoire de France depuis 1789." Henri Martin, i., 151). While Burke thus helped to bring the King and Queen to the guillotine, Paine pleaded for their lives to the last moment. While Paine maintained the right of mankind to improve their condition, Burke held that "the awful Author of our being is the author of our place in the order of existence; and that, having disposed and marshalled us by a divine ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... sighed, Remembering;—then shut my teeth and feigned The harsh voice calling me,—then clinched my nails So deeply in my palms, the sharp wounds pained, And tossed my face toward heaven, as one who pales In splendid martyrdom, with soul serene, As near to God as high the guillotine. And I had envied her? Not that—O no! But I had longed for some sweet haven so!— Wherein the tempest-beaten heart might ride Sometimes at peaceful anchor, and abide Where those that loved me touched me with their hands, And looked upon me with glad eyes, ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley

... could be seen a discoloured head with the hair hanging down. The lofty tribune of the Convention looked down upon a cloud of dust, amid which wild faces were yelling cries "Death!" Anyone who passed, at midday, close to the basin of the Tuileries could hear each blow of the guillotine, as if they were ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... Tallien! was this a time for amorous conference? Henriot, the tyrant's most devoted creature, Marshals the force of Paris: The fierce club, With Vivier at their head, in loud acclaim Have sworn to make the guillotine in blood Float on the scaffold.—But who ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... the close of this year it was manifest that the king was on the high-road to the scaffold. Red-caps were worn in public by the victorious Jacobins as a party badge, and as a declaration of war against all the moderate and all the friends of right; and the guillotine, beneath which thousands of victims were to bleed, was introduced. France had already assumed the aspect of an arena of wild beasts: Dan-ton, Robespierre, and Marat were already licking their jaws ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... basket, we sent up the books, instruments, and clothes to swell our growing midden on the deck; and then Nares, going on hands and knees, began to forage underneath the bed. Box after box of Manilla cigars rewarded his search. I took occasion to smash some of these boxes open, and even to guillotine the bundles of cigars; but quite in vain—no secret cache of opium ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... part was written in the Luxembourg prison, under the shadow of the guillotine. But life is only a sentence of death, with an indefinite reprieve. Prison, to Paine, was not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... with a horrid grin; "if we had you in la belle France, your head would not remain long on your shoulders. We guillotine all such. It's the best way to treat them. They have trampled too long on ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston

... class who are not only intellectual, but they are earnest and grave. They do not wish change for the sake of it. They love liberty and would die for it. Many of this class were murdered in cold blood by Louis Napoleon. Others were sent to Cayenne, to fall a prey to a climate cruel as the guillotine, or were sent into strange lands to beg their bread. These men were the real glory of France, and yet they were forced to ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... know thy fate for many a day, though she shall search long and frantically and not meet the beloved until within the shadow of the guillotine, it may give the reader what comfort it will that the blind sister still lives—a lost mite in the vast ocean ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... getting red at once with the passion of his protest—"hard—it ought to condemn him, to guillotine him. What are juries for if they don't kill such rascals ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... picture that persisted was that of the Conciergerie during the French Revolution. I was a noble, talking gaily to beautiful ladies also under the shadow of death, and, right in the middle of a jest, a gloomy fellow had just come in—to lead me to the guillotine. The door was opening, and I kissed my hand ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... may be true, Boyne. It may be true, but I wouldn't put faith in it—not for one icy minute. I don't want to see here in Ireland the horrors and savagery of France. I don't want to see the guillotine up on St. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... respecting the minister of justice in this country; in plain words, I mean the hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the mode of inflicting capital punishments with us, there is too much of the ministry of the human hand. The guillotine, as performing its functions more of itself and sparing human agency, though a cruel and disgusting exhibition, in my mind has many ways the advantage over our way. In beheading, indeed, as it was formerly practised ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... William White. Traditions have come to us concerning the clairvoyance of the Greek exponent of the Pythagorean teachings, Apollonius of Tyana, and the case of Cavotte, who predicted his own death and that of Robespierre and others by the guillotine, is on record. The illumination of Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie seer, and that of Thomas Lake Harris of Fountain Grove, are modern examples of abnormal faculty of a nature which places them outside the field of direct evidence. A ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... do a head of you that would startle you," thought Dick,—this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under the guillotine,—but he only said, "I am very sorry," and harrowed Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later, insensibly and to a large extent against his own will, he ceased to interest ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... the exasperated conductor. "Don't you know the old man's on, that he wanted to stop at Pee-Wee to meet the G.M. this morning, that a whole engineering outfit will be idle there for half a day, and you'll get the guillotine?" ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman

... crowds met before? Somewhere he had seen them in body or in spirit. Was it in the streets of Paris before the French Revolution sent those long lines of death carts rumbling over her pavements to the guillotine? ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... fond of literature. During the sad last months of his imprisonment, before the guillotine took his life, he read over 230 volumes. He especially liked books of travel and geography, and one of his favourite works was the VOYAGES of Cook. He had the volumes near him in the last phase of his existence. There is a pleasant drawing representing the King in his prison, ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott

... when taken out of the bath. The window, behind whose curtains the heroine hid, after she had plunged the dagger into the heart of the man whom she thought was the cause of the shedding of so much blood by the guillotine, was pointed out with a seeming degree of pride by ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown

... laid it bare, had finished its toilets for the guillotine, when the woodcutters were about to sap its base, five men commenced hauling at the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... him at the station. In Paris he allowed Napoleon to slumber unnoticed in the Invalides while he hunted the Faubourg Saint-Antoine for traces of "The Tale of Two Cities," and the Place de la Concorde for the site of the guillotine on which Sidney Carton died, and the Latin Quarter haunts of Mimi and Musette, and the Bal Bullier where Trilby danced, and the Concert des Ambassadeurs where Zaza ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... the sheets of Crown C.A. paper was to guillotine the half sheets horizontally in half and then twice vertically, dividing each horizontal half into three small sheets, the half C.A. sheet of paper yielding six small Gambia sheets (plates XII. and XIII.). The ...
— Gambia • Frederick John Melville

... old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it—the guillotine. Besides, the malignant condition has spread. There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also. His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon be obstructed and strangulation will ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse



Words linked to "Guillotine" :   closure, gag law, behead, decollate, cloture, gag rule, instrument of execution



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