his hat in his hand, and clad in the sable garb he had ever worn. It seemed to me that I was informing all these dumb witnesses that there was an end of the curse which had weighed on their race. Then, ringing the bell, I asked for a basin and water; and alone with God who sees in our hearts I solemnly laved those hands which the blood of my brethren was henceforth never to soil.

I then repaired to my mother's apartment. I can still see her in her velvet armchair, from which the poor old woman seldom rose. I placed on her lap the message from the Minister of Justice. She read it, and turning towards me her kindly eyes:

'Blessed be this day, my son!' she said. 'It frees you from the inheritance of your fathers.'

And as I remained speechless with such emotion as

I could not control, she added:

.

'It must have come to this sooner or later. You Heaven has only given you

are the last of your race.

daughters; I was always thankful for it.'

On the following day eighteen competitors were postulating for my bloody functions; there was no difficulty in finding a substitute.

As for myself I had but one course to follow. I hastened to sell my ancient residence, full of sad recollections, wherein three out of seven generations had lived under opprobrium and ignominy. My horses, my

carriage-which bore as a coat of arms a cracked bell— I also got rid of. In short, I gave up all that could remind me of the past; and then, shaking the dust from my feet, I bade an eternal farewell to the hereditary abode in which, as my ancestors, I had never tasted peace in day and repose in night.

But for the advanced age and the infirmities of my mother, I should have gone to the New World. It was my chief wish to place the Ocean between me and the country where I had fulfilled such dismal functions. America, with its new manners, its virgin forests, its immense rivers, of which I had read in the works of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper, was the land I longed to see. It seemed to me that by renouncing a name that had acquired such unwelcome celebrity, I could turn a new leaf of the book of life on setting foot on American soil. But I was bound by duty to abide in Paris. My aged mother would have insisted on accompanying me, and her strength must have been unequal to the fatigues of a sea voyage. I therefore remained with her to watch her and close her eyes which had shed so many bitter tears.

I was called upon only too soon to perform this sacred duty. Less than three years after my removal from the office of public executioner I had the grief to witness the death of the worthy and venerable woman who had given me, besides life, the benefit of her wise

advice and the example of her virtues. This was a sad blow for me, and it lay on my mind a long time. Time wiled away; I became too advanced in years to cultivate the illusion of a new life. I was fain to give up my scheme of emigration.

However, I hastened to quit Paris, and I made choice of a retreat so safe and so secluded that nothing ever came to remind me of the melancholy occupation of my former life. I have lived there for twelve years under a name which is not mine, reaping with something like secret shame the friendship and good-will which I constantly fear to see dispelled by the discovery of my former avocations. But in this obscure shelter whither I had fled from my recollections, the past recurs to my memory with extraordinary lucidity; and, old as I am now, weary of a bleak and vain life, I have yielded to the strongest of temptations, that of writing the book of which these pages form the preface.

Idleness and solitude are no safe resorts for a morbid imagination. Constantly troubled with thoughts bearing on the predestination of my birth, on the first occupation of my life, my mind wandered back to the time of the adventure, to be told hereafter, by which a bequest, which, thank Heaven, I have transmitted to none of mine, came into my family. I remembered the line of ancestors among whom even a child of seven years was bound to the scaffold. My great-grandfather,

Charles Jean-Baptiste, born in Paris on April 19, 1719, succeeded to his father on October 2, 1726; and as so young a child could not possibly discharge the functions of executioner, the Parliament supplied him with an assistant and instructor named Prudhomme, but ordered that the child should sanction executions by his presence. A strange thing, indeed, was this regency in the history of the scaffold.

I thought of my grandfather, who had been compelled to wield the axe and the knife on the head of King, Queen, nobles, and révolutionnaires during the French Revolution. I had seen, in my youth, the hale figure of the old man. He had written a daily record of his terrible occupations, thus continuing the register in which my ancestors had inscribed the doings of our

race.

In reading those singular annals, which, in my turn, I continued, and which begin by the Chamber of Torture and the poudre de succession, then dwell on the saturnalias of the Regency and of Louis XV.'s reign, and come to a conclusion in our century after passing through the French Revolution, I have found curious recollections at almost every page, anecdotes of the time, accounts of traditions carefully preserved in my family, a chaos of illustrious and abject names-the Count de Horn between Poulailler and Cartouche; Lally-Tollendal, and the Chevalier de la Barre next to Damiens; and.

then, with a king as leader, the cortège of the victims of the Revolution. I was reminded of my conversations with my father concerning the Infernal Machine devised under the first Empire, the conspiracy of Georges Cadoudal, the Companions of Jehu, the Chauffeurs, &c.; and I also bore in mind the dramas in which it was my lot to take a part, the condemnation of the four Sergeants of La Rochelle, that of Louvel and of all the disciples of Jacques Clément, and Ravaillac, who vainly attempted to murder Louis Philippe. There was also the execution of Lesurques, the victim of a judicial mistake, and a more recent gang of the worst class of criminals, Papavoine, Castaing, Lacenaire, Soufflard, Poulmann. It struck me that in all this there was matter for a work whereof the interest and utility might in some degree conceal the individuality of the author.

I have therefore written the present book, appending to it a sketch of punishments in France, and an account of the office of Executioner. This book I now publish. If it had for purpose to furnish food for the unhealthy curiosity of people who would seek emotions in a kind of written photograph of the scenes that take place on the scaffold, it should be received with loathsomeness; but I would rather burn my writings than follow a course so contrary to my object. Far from this, I have been actuated in the course of my work by an abhorrence for the punishment denounced by so