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There they put him into a kind of Sack of Shamoy Leather, leaving only his Head free; and he was tied down to his bed which was a common Hospital Pallet by an immense number of Leathern Straps, secured by Iron Rings to the Floor of his Dungeon. But what Dr. Goldsmith, the Poetry-writer, means by "Damiens' Bed of Steel," I'm sure I don't know.
Previously, there existed only a subsidy, for the relief of the poor. After Groulard, a counsellor of parliament, named Damiens, wishing to uphold more effectually the existence of the hospital; quitted his house and situation, on purpose to live within and in this way be nearer to watch over the wants of the poor. The Hospice-Général has been successively enlarged at different periods.
We are not all expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that. But will a gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example from the fields of gallantry? Your Church and Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help, to edify, to set divine examples.
Especially do I remember the animation with which he dwelt on the horrible story of Damiens, executed with every conceivable torture for the attempted assassination of Louis Quinze. He ran through the catalogue of torments so that we all shivered, winding up with a contemptuous, "And all that for just pricking the skin of that scoundrel Louis XV." I was already thinking of some reply both to Mr.
She received her first check when, Damiens having attempted to assassinate the king, the dauphin was regent for eleven days. She was confined to her room and heard nothing from the king, who was in the hands of the clergy.
The blood, heated by exercise and impatience, throbbed fiercely in her temples and thumped heavily at her heart, producing a half-suffocating sensation; and, in her feverish anxiety, the doom of Damiens appeared tolerable in comparison with the torturing suspense of nine hours on the rack.
"The martyrdom of Rohatzek, however, was a mere trifle compared with the ordeal by which the tribunal of Paris tried in vain to extort a confession of the would-be regicide, Damiens. Robert Damiens, a native of Arras, had been exiled as an habitual criminal, and returning in disguise made an attempt upon the life of Louis XV, January 5, 1757.
And, lo! as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so long even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven!
I have seen a man keel-hauled at sea, and brought up on the other side, his face all larded with barnacles like a Shrove-tide capon. I stood by when that poor mad wretch Damiens was pulled to pieces by horses in the Grève. I have seen what the plague could do in the galleys at Marseilles. Death and I have been boon companions and bedfellows.
If a commoner gave a noble even so much as a Damiens-scratch which didn't kill or even hurt, he got Damiens' dose for it just the same; they pulled him to rags and tatters with horses, and all the world came to see the show, and crack jokes, and have a good time; and some of the performances of the best people present were as tough, and as properly unprintable, as any that have been printed by the pleasant Casanova in his chapter about the dismemberment of Louis XV's poor awkward enemy.
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