'Twould be well if our legislators,
instead of their puerile and frothy declamations against revolutionary
principles and the ambition of Napoleon, would occupy themselves seriously
with this subject. But then the lawyers would all oppose the simplification
of our Code. They find by experience that a complicated one, obstructed by
customs, statutes and acts of Parliament, difficult to be correctly
interpreted, and frequently at variance with each other, is a much more
profitable thing, a much wider and more lucrative field for the exercise of
their profession, than the simplicity of the Code Napoleon; and they would
die of rage and despair at the thought of anybody not a lawyer being able
to interpret the laws himself. Now as our country gentlemen and members of
Parliament are always much inclined to take lawyer's advice, and are
besides fully persuaded and convinced that there are no abuses whatever in
England and that everything is as it should be, there is no hope of any
amelioration in this particular. All reasoning and argument is lost on such
political optimists.
The punishment of the guillotine certainly appears to be the most humane
mode of terminating the existence of a man that could possibly be invented.
The apparatus is preserved in the Hotel de Ville, and is never exposed to
view or erected on the place of execution, till about an hour before the
execution itself takes place. At the hour appointed the criminal is brought
to the scaffold, fastened to the board, placed at right angles with the
fatal instrument, the head protruding thro' the groove, which embraces the
neck; the executioner pulls a cord, the axe descends and the head of the
criminal falls into a basket. The whole ceremony of the execution does not
take three minutes when the criminal once arrives at the foot of the
guillotine. There is none of that horrible struggling that takes place in
the operation of hanging.
June 21st, 1816.
The ceremony of the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Berri passed off
quietly enough. Several people, it is true, were arrested for seditious
expressions, but no tumult occurred. A great apprehension seemed to prevail
lest something should occur, but the gendarmerie and police were so
vigilant that all projects, had there been any, would have proved abortive.
[59] Virgil, Georg., I, 35. - ED.
[60] Colonel Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle was the celebrated exposer of the scandal
in 1808-9, when the mistress of the Duke of York was found to be
trafficking in Commissions. He had retired from active service in
1802, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Financial reasons obliged
him, after 1815, to live on the Continent; he died in Florence,
1833. - ED.
[61] Sir Robert Thomas Wilson (1779-1849), author of The History of the
British Expedition to Egypt, 1802; a French translation of that work
elicited a protest from Napoleon.
