"The accused, ranged in order, were condemned at sight. Hundreds of
death-sentences took about a minute per head. Children of seven, five
and four years of age, were tried. A father was condemned for the
son, and the son for the father. A dog was sentenced to death. A
parrot was brought forward as a witness. Numbers of accused persons
whose sentences could not be written out were executed."
At Angers, the sentences of over four hundred men and three hundred
and sixty women, executed for the purpose of relieving the prisons,
were mentioned on the registers simply by the letters S or G (shot or
guillotined).[27] At Paris, as in the provinces, the slightest
pretext[28] served to constitute a crime. The daughter of the
celebrated painter, Joseph Vernet,[29] was guillotined for being a "
receiver," for having kept fifty pounds of candles in her house,
distributed among the employees of La Muette by the liquidators of the
civil list. Young de Maill?,[30] aged sixteen years, was guillotined
as a conspirator, "for having thrown a rotten herring in the face of
his jailer, who had served it to him to eat." Madame de Puy-Verin was
guillotined as "guilty" because she had not taken away from her deaf,
blind and senile husband a bag of card-counters, marked with the royal
effigy.
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