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This humane and ingenious gentleman, by profession a player, is known likewise as the author of several farces and vaudevilles, and of the executions at Lyons. It is asserted, that many of the inhabitants of this unfortunate city expiated under the Guillotine the crime of having formerly hissed Collot's successful attempts on the stage.
Fortune and greater fortune at first; days in which he could not lose, days in which he drove back to the crowded inns choked with dust, sunburnt and fagged with excitement, to a riotous supper and baccarat, and afterward went to sleep only to see cards and horses and moving crowds and clouds of dust; days spent in a short covert coat, with a field-glass over his shoulder and with a pasteboard ticket dangling from his buttonhole; and then came the change that brought conscience up again, and the visits to the Jews, and the slights of the men who had never been his friends, but whom he had thought had at least liked him for himself, even if he did not like them; and then debts, and more debts, and the borrowing of money to pay here and there, and threats of executions; and, with it all, the longing for the fields and trout springs of Surrey and the walk across the park to where she lived.
Alminsky, a Bolshevist writer of note, felt called upon to protest against this hideous travesty of democratic justice, and wrote in Pravda: The absence of the necessary restraint makes one feel appalled at the "instruction" issued by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to "All Provincial Extraordinary Commissions," which says: "The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission is perfectly independent in its work, carrying out house searches, arrests, executions, of which it afterward reports to the Council of the People's Commissaries and to the Central Executive Council."
The mother's eyes were also closed. At that moment, the sun rose, and there was already on the Place a fairly numerous assembly of people who looked on from a distance at what was being thus dragged along the pavement to the gibbet. For that was Provost Tristan's way at executions. He had a passion for preventing the approach of the curious. There was no one at the windows.
Popular writers and speakers dwell on the executions of Campian and his friends as worse than the Smithfield burnings, and amidst general admiration and approval these martyred saints have been lately canonised. Their mission, it is said, was purely religious. Was it so?
"Good-by, Bill," was the remark of the latter, as he spurred his horse and left Bill hanging. One of the most singular phenomena of these executions was that of Bill Hunter, who, while hanging by the neck, went through all the motions of drawing and firing his six-shooter six times. Whether the action was conscious or unconscious it is impossible to tell.
He took delight in killing men with slow tortures, that, as he expressed it, they might feel themselves dying, being always present at such executions himself, directing the duration of the punishment, and mitigating the tortures merely to prolong them. 3. In fact, he valued himself for no quality more than his unrelenting temper, and inflexible severity, when he presided at an execution. 4.
Referring, since that expression of opinion, to the very last trial for murder in London, I have made inquiry, and am assured that the youth now under sentence of death in Newgate for the murder of his master in Drury Lane, was a vigilant spectator of the three last public executions in this City.
Executions for debt were in his house, and he passed his last days in the custody of sheriffs' officers, who abstained from conveying him to prison merely because they were assured that to remove him would cause his immediate death. The Cardinal de Retz sold off everything to pay his debts, but he did not recover his liberty. He described the perpetual anguish of the debtor.
Like Elizabeth, all her subjects were fond of the savage pastime of bear and bull baiting. It cannot be denied that this people had a taste for blood, took delight in brutal encounters, and drew the sword and swung the cudgel with great promptitude; nor were they fastidious in the matter of public executions.
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