commissaries of the Commune, instructed to be present, as
Municipal officials, at the execution of the King, sat in the
Mayor's carriage, laughing and conversing in loud tones.
One of them, Jacques Roux, derisively drew the other's
attention to Capet's fat calves and abdomen.

The armed men who surrounded the scaffold had only
swords and pikes; there were very few muskets. Most of
them wore large round hats or red caps. A few platoons
of mounted dragoons in uniform were mingled with these
troops at intervals. A whole squadron of dragoons was
ranged in battle array beneath the terraces of the
Tuileries. What was called the Battalion of Marseilles
formed one of the sides of the square.

The guillotine--it is always with repugnance that one
writes this hideous word--would appear to the craftsmen
of to-day to be very badly constructed. The knife was
simply suspended to a pulley fixed in the centre of the
upper beam. This pulley and a rope the thickness of a
man's thumb constituted the whole apparatus. The
knife, which was not very heavily weighted, was of small
dimensions and had a curved edge, which gave it the form
of a reversed Phrygian cap. No hood was placed to shelter
the King's head and at the same time to hide and circumscribe
its fall. All that crowd could see the head of
Louis XVI. drop, and it was thanks to chance, thanks perhaps to
the smallness of the knife which diminished the
violence of the shock, that it did not bound beyond the
basket to the pavement. Terrible incident, which often