Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  You want to know—all France wants to know—what takes place in the executioner's mind: the figure who before the Revolution wielded the double-bladed axe and double-handed sword and who branded, burned, and broke on the wheel all who came before him. The figure who now slides heads through what they call the Republican Window on the guillotine. Does he eat? Does he sleep? Do his smiles freeze the blood? Is he kind to those he kills? Does he touch his wife on days he works? Does he reach for you with blood-rimmed fingernails? Did he spring full-blown from a black pit to send batch after batch through the guillotine?

  Becoming shrill, my wife calls it, whenever I get too agitated in my own defense.

  “What struck people's minds above all else,” Livy, the great Roman, wrote in his History on Brutus's sacrifice of his own sons for the good of the Republic, “is that his function as consul imposed on the father the task of punishing his sons, and that his unbendingness compelled him personally to order the execution, the very sight of which was not spared him.” In Guérin's rendering of the scene, the hero turns away but does not blanch. Standing before it in the old Royal Academy with Anne-Marie, I told her that perhaps this is the way we attain the sublime: by our fierce devotion to the required. She was not able to agree.

  I am a good Catholic. The people's judges hand out their sentences, and mine is the task of insuring that their words become incarnate. I am the instrument, and it is justice that strikes. I feel the same remorse as anyone required to be present at an execution.

  Before the Revolution, justice was apportioned and discharged in the name of the King, who ruled by divine right as one of God's implements. Punishment of malefactors was God's will and therefore earned for his sovereign minister God's grace and esteem. But in the eyes of most, that grace and esteem did not extend as far as the sovereign's handservant. Before the Revolution, daughters of executioners were forbidden to marry outside the profession. When their girls came of age, such families had to display on their doors a yellow affidavit clarifying the family's trade, and acknowledging the taint in their bloodline. Letters of commission and payments were not passed into their hands but dropped before them. They were required to live at the southern ends of towns, and their houses had to be painted red.

  Before the Revolution, a woman with whom I dined at an inn demanded I be made to appear in court to apologize for having shared with her a dinner table. She petitioned that executioners be directed to wear a particular badge or color upon their coats or singlets so that all would know their profession. Before the Revolution, our children were allowed no playmates but one another.

  For lunch today there was egg soup with lemon juice and broth, cock's comb, a marrowbone, chicken fried in bread crumbs, jelly, apricots, bread, and fennel comfits. Clearing the table, Anne-Marie reminisced about a holiday we took when the children were small. When she speaks to me, she holds the family before us like a pleasing little stove. At first she was able to treat this terrible time as a brigand unable to trespass upon the better world she bore within.

  With children, everything and nothing registers. My earliest memory is of the house outside Paris, and the height of the manure pile, and the muck dropped by the household geese. I remember flies whenever one went outside. I remember my mother's calm voice and associate it with needlework. She was fond of saying that I had no ideas of grandeur and that she would wish that to continue. My grandmother always chided me for losing even a crumb of my bread, since, as she put it, I couldn't make for myself even that. My father was a quiet man who, when it came to my understanding the world, resolved that his little boy should become a person capable of self-sufficiency, so he allowed me to negotiate my own passage through that household. I was perceived to be headstrong but inhibited. I was sent away at an early age and then pitched from school to school, since the moment my classmates uncovered my family's profession, life became unbearable again. I wrote my mother a series of supplications outlining my misery and pleading for a response. In a cheerless chapel in a school in Rouen—my fourth in as many years—I received my father's letter informing me of her death.

  He remarried; the house was repopulated with half brothers and sisters; I stayed away at my schools. I matured into a beanstalk whose expressions excited pity on the street. My teachers knew me as dutiful, alert, frugal, and friendless: a nonentity with ambitions. I was often cold and known for my petitions to sit nearer the room's hearth. I volunteered for small errands so that in solitude I might gather the strength to face the rest of the day. I wrote to myself in my notebooks that I felt my bleak present within me and ached to my bones with wondering if loneliness would always be the measure of my days.

  Anne-Marie was a market gardener's daughter in Montmartre, her father's establishment a luncheon stop on my infrequent visits home from school. She was his eldest, born the same day as myself, and when we first conversed I imagined that we had loved each other from that date, unawares.

  Her first act in my presence was to scratch at a rash on her foot until chided by her father entering the room with the roast. She visited the water closet, and back at the table returned my gaze as if examining a distant coastline. She was still chewing a bit of carrot. From that first meeting I have perched perpetually, in a kind of dreamy distress, on the very edge of relieving my longings. Her lovely large mouth and deep-set eyes with their veiled expression, and her child's posture have been my harbor and receding horizon. Her seat, that first luncheon, was in the sun, and her skin was so fine I could see the circulation of her blood. When she blushed, I could feel the warmth.

  I contrived to visit more often. She confided her various sadnesses, her mother having led a life regulated by an intricate and dispiriting routine, much of which centered itself on the needs of her younger sister. Her father's health and general cheerlessness prevented him from finding solace in anything. But even in that company, she found the resources to engage, with animation, in any society offered her, as if the seas that swamped other shipping beat upon her little boat in vain.

  With her I tended toward passionate recollection of my own imagined virtues. Without her my private life had been a record of uninterrupted emptiness and misery. Her first letter to me upon my return to school concluded, “I seem to have written you a newspaper instead of a note, as was my intention. My conduct is most mysterious. Well. Until later—”

  She saw in me a perceptive enough boy, self-educated in a variety of disciplines, from astronomy to law, from medicine to agronomy. I was tall. I was charitable, and kind to the poor. I played the cello, and seemed someone with whom a good home could be constructed. Her family was poor enough that an executioner's son was still a possibility, but respected enough that she was as good a match as my family would find. For her, marriage to someone like me meant renouncing vanities she had never possessed, and for which she had no desire.

  Soon after our marriage I related to her the story of my first execution, a story designed to elicit her pity. From the age of eleven, whenever I was home from school, I had been my father's assistant. When I was sixteen he retired and left me alone on the scaffold with a few of his assistants, now mine. A man named Mongeot was to be bludgeoned and then broken on the wheel for having murdered his mistress's husband. His mistress was to be held under guard and made to witness what transpired. A snowstorm had enveloped the scaffold, coating it in a kind of sleet, and I stood in the wind clutching my collar against the wet while my mulatto did the bludgeoning. The man's mistress shrieked and clawed at her guards' faces and tore at her hair. It took Mongeot two hours to die. I'd worn the wrong boots, and my feet were soaked through and freezing. I could not see for my weeping and misheld the lever when we were in the act of breaking his legs. My grandmother, bundled in robes and representing the family, lost patience and shouted at me. The crowd hissed and showered me with contempt.

  Anne-Marie pitied me for such stories but after an expression of sympathy maintained a wary silence. Our newlyweds' happiness was then colored by a kind of qui
et. There were other stories I didn't share with her. After Mongeot, a man named Damiens who had tried to stab the King was sentenced to be drawn and quartered. No one had been quartered in France since Ravaillac, more than a century before. I went to my father, who said he had no advice to give. I offered to resign my commission, but my grandmother summoned my uncle, executioner of Reims, to steady me. Our assistants were to handle the preliminaries, and on the appointed day drank until they could barely stand. They tottered between the instruments while the crowd jeered at their fumblings and shouted abuse. The hand that had held the knife was severed and boiling oil and lead were poured into the wound. The man's screams were such that we could not hear each others' instructions. Then the horses only dislocated his limbs without separating them from the trunk. The executioner's sword lodged in one of his shoulder joints. I had to run and find an axe.

  Some three months after the fall of the Bastille, the National Assembly took up the issue of renovating the penal code, and in the middle of those proceedings, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, deputy from Paris and professor of anatomy on the Faculty of Medicine, set forth his argument favoring a fixed punishment for the same crimes, regardless of the convicted's rank and estate. He reminded the Assembly of the infamies of the unenlightened past and proposed a less barbaric method of capital punishment: automatic decapitation by a mechanism yet to be developed. A Jesuit, he'd left the order, choosing a ministry of the body over that of the soul. He wanted the machinery of execution to be fearful but the death to be easy. There was enthusiasm for his proposal among the revolutionaries: a capital punishment that was mercifully quick and democratic would mark another step toward the regeneration of society. It was pointed out that while the executioner's sword might require two or three strokes, with a machine the condemned man would not be kept waiting. Lally-Tollendal's name was resurrected: some years before, I'd proven unable to dispatch him, requiring my father to take over the blade.

  After the usual delay the measure was adopted in the new penal code, and the next challenge became how to cut off all those heads. I was invited to submit a memorandum sharing my views, in which I explained that in any multiple execution, the sword is not fit to perform after the first, but must be either reground and sharpened or replaced by an impractical succession of swords, depending on the number condemned. I also pointed out that for an execution by sword to arrive at the result prescribed by the law, the executioner must be consistently skillful and the condemned at least momentarily steadfast, and that in the event of multiple executions, there would be the issue of blood in such quantities that it would affect even the most intrepid of those to be executed, so that it would be indispensable to find some means by which the condemned could be secured for the blow, and the public order protected.

  Dr. Guillotin had begun to lose interest in his idea, but Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, engaged a German pianomaker to build the prototype. There was some difficulty finding men to do the job. They had to be made exempt from signing the usual working papers so that their identities could remain a secret.

  The result is what my assistants call the Great Machine. At the heart of its design are two uprights five meters high and fifty centimeters apart, which flank a blade weighing seven kilos. Bolted to the top of the blade is a thirty-kilogram iron bar to heighten the force of its descent. The assembly falls from top to bottom in three quarters of a second. The cutting edge is slanted so that the blow, as it penetrates into the parts it divides, acts as a saw of lightning efficiency. The blade lands at the head of a narrow tablelike arrangement for the condemned. From a distance the whole thing has the austerity of a diagram. The grooves are rubbed down with soap before each use. Disassembled, it's stored in a shed known as the Widow's House.

  My sons and I supervised its first test at the Bicêtre Hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Before us and the assembled dignitaries Dr.

  Louis beheaded a bundle of straw, a live sheep, and several corpses, the last of which required three tries, so it was decided the height of the uprights would be extended, and weight added to the blade. At that very first demonstration, I was heard to wonder aloud whether the machine's very efficiency would prove to be a source of regret.

  So on the 22nd of March in the year 1792, the Abbé Chappe bestowed his invention, the telegraph, upon the Assembly. And on the 25th, Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Louis's machine was inaugurated. The culprit was strapped facedown to the plank, which was then tilted to the horizontal and run forward on grooves until his neck slid onto the lunette, a semicircular block. The block was not struck by the falling blade but grazed at high speed, so that the head was planed off. In an eye-blink it leapt seventeen or eighteen inches from the trunk. For some the head was gone before the eye could trace the blow. It became clear that the minimum size for the basket must be that of an infant's bathtub. The executioner's role in the proceedings consisted of giving a little tug on a lever. The crowd saw the blade but not the hand that moved it. Much time was consumed afterward with the mess. Four buckets of water alone were used on the grooves and block.

  I used to have a constitution able to endure labor that might have hamstrung a team of oxen. Now my complaints include dizziness, inflammation of the eyes, colic, and rheumatic pains.

  What talk I have with Anne-Marie occurs in the early morning before the workday begins. On the way out of our little courtyard I'll pass her hanging laundry to dry, if it's warm enough, or plucking salad herbs into a basket. Across from us a shop sells brushes of every manner and use. Its proprietor is a drunk and in all weather slumps beside its door in an old wreck of an iron chair. We can hear the knife grinder's bell as he makes his rounds.

  For the last three months I've approached her heartbroken with the misfortune I helped author, because in August at the execution of three men accused of forging promissory notes, our youngest boy, Gabriel, fell when exhibiting one of the heads, fracturing his skull and dying before my eyes. He was twenty-one. There'd always been in our family puzzled concern about him, since he'd kept hidden his aspirations and inner life. All we knew was that he was great for peeling oranges when they were in season. In response to interrogatives he stroked his upper lip with his forefinger and seemed to wait for the intelligent part of the question to emerge. He'd wanted to try his hand at another profession, and Anne-Marie had wished the same for him. But I'd reminded her of his cousin's experience of having apprenticed himself to a locksmith only to find that no one would patronize their shop. The subject had been dropped. Then Gabriel had offered to join the National Guard, to which his older brother had responded by asking if he thought himself too refined for the family business. His uncles hadn't been even that kind. I had done my best to comfort him but had also requested that he remain a realist about his future.

  That morning the clouds had poured forth rain, the sky churning as if with empyrean seas. The wood up on the scaffold was slick and the cobblestones below greasy with mud. Our hair was whipped by the wind. There'd been the usual silence as the executioner had walked about the platform, while each assistant tended to a special task, one assistant handling the strapping to the plank, one seeing to the remaining condemned, one adjusting the heads on the lunette while wearing a waxed ankle-length apron. Each assistant is given a chance at one point or another to display one of the heads.

  Gabriel I usually assigned to the remaining condemned. He moved about his responsibilities like a child resignedly attending a new school. The third head pitched from its lost shoulders. It was his turn to reach his arm down into the basket. I could not see from where I stood whether his expression as he held it up by the hair was one of fascinated horror or queasy forbearance or distracted indifference. The rain and the three men's blood made the front of the scaffold slick as soap. There was no rail.

  Perseus hoisted Medusa's head. Judith, Holofernes's. David, Goliath's. The head warns of the consequences of violating the sovereign peace. Held by the hair and presented at the scaffold, it represen
ts the government's discharge of its promise to maintain order. An executioner's reputation depends to a large extent upon his efficiency and elan with that display. Doing his best to manifest the head to as much of the crowd as he could, and failing to look where he put his feet, our Gabriel slipped and split his head open on the cobblestones. The head he'd been holding scattered the crowd. We carried him back to the house in the cart that had brought the condemned.

  It's said that, losing his wife and crazed with grief, Robespierre's father abandoned his four children, the eldest being only seven, and traveled in turn through England and the German states, eventually dying in Munich. And so young Robespierre became at seven the implacable and unhappy figure he remains today. All through the early morning hours of that terrible night, Anne-Marie lay like one of the Furies on her bed and would not be consoled. I was not allowed into the room.

  A week passed before she addressed me. Her misery was a well from which her spirit refused to surface. I saw only stiffness and mistrust when I got too near. All her gestures seemed devitalized, as if viewed in dim candlelight. If not for her capacity for work, she would have seemed imprisoned in a perpetual exhaustion.

  It was a busy time for the executioner. She observed without comment my unimpaired predilection for order, my consistency of demeanor, and my undiminished capacities of concentration.

  We both remembered a time, after the imprisonment of the King, when I'd been of a sudden possessed by an ungovernable rage with all of those in power who had brought our nation to her present catastrophe, and had resolved to leave Paris. Gabriel in particular had loved the idea. But my passion had subsided, and I'd understood just a bit of what such a decision would involve. Was everyone to abandon his post every time the country took a turn for the worse? Was it left to each servant of the state to decide which laws he would carry out, and which he would not? Did anyone but the highest ministers have sufficient information on which to base their opinions?