"When she was stretched on the platform," as the _Mémoires des Sanson_ relate, "the fustigation commenced, and as long as it lasted, her cries became all the more furious. Her imprecations were especially addressed to the Cardinal de Rohan; ... she received a dozen blows with the rods; ... she remained during some moments mute, motionless, and as though fainting. Charles-Henri Sanson thought to take advantage of this to carry out the final directions of the sentence. Her dress had been torn in the struggles she had undergone, and her shoulder was uncovered. He took an iron from the brazier, and, approaching her, he pressed it upon the skin. Madame de la Motte uttered the cry of a wounded hyena, and, throwing herself upon one of the assistants who held her, she bit his hand with so much fury that she took out a portion of the flesh. Then, and although tightly bound, she began again to defend herself. Taking advantage of the care which the executioners exercised in this struggle against a woman, she succeeded for a long time in paralyzing all their attempts, and it was only very imperfectly that the iron was applied a second time, to the other shoulder." [Illustration: THE GUILLOTINE IN THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, FORMERLY THE PLACE DE LA REVOLUTION, WHERE LOUIS XVI WAS BEHEADED, JANUARY 21, 1793.] The red-hot iron slipped, and the brand was made on her breast instead. "This time she uttered a cry more heart-rending and more terrible than all the others, and fainted. They took advantage of this to put her in a carriage and convey her to the Salpêtrière." Such was the administration of justice in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the most civilized capital in Christendom! It is to be regretted that Destiny, with her usual disregard of sound ethics, should have passed over the heads of the vainglorious Louis XIV and the corrupt Louis XV to wreak the final vengeance due the Bourbons on that of their well-intentioned but incapable successor. In the eyes of Clio, weakness is the Unforgivable Sin. The grandson of Louis XV, when he ascended the throne in 1774, at the age of twenty, was "a prince of pure habits, of very limited intelligence, of an extreme timidity both in character and speech, loving the good, desirous of it, but, unfortunately, too feeble to be able to impose his will on those around him. While he was still dauphin, being one day reproached by the courtiers with his sober humor in the midst of the totally unregulated court of his grandfather, he replied: 'I wish to be called Louis the Severe.'" One day his minister, Turgot, entering his cabinet, found him seriously occupied. "You see," the monarch said to him, "I am working also." He was drawing up a memoir for the destruction of rabbits in the neighborhood of cultivated estates!