"Guillotin, Médecin Politique, Imagine un beau matin Que pendre est inhumain Et peu patriotique; Aussitôt, Il lui faut Un supplice Que, sans corde ni poteau, Supprime du bourreau L'office," etc. It was on the 17th of April, 1792, that proof was made of the first guillotine—not yet famed through France as the nation's razor. Three corpses, it is said (commodities easily procured at Bicêtre), were furnished for the experiment, which Doctors Guillotine and Louis directed. Mirabeau's physician and friend Cabanis was of the party, and—a not unimportant assistant—Samson the headsman, with his two brothers and his son. "The mere weight of the axe," said Cabanis, "sheared the heads with the swiftness of a glance, and the bones were clean severed (_coupés net_)" Dr. Louis recommended that the knife should be given an oblique direction, so that it might cut saw-fashion in its fall. The guillotine was definitely adopted; and eight days later, the 25th of April, it settled accounts with an assassin named Pelletier, who was the first to "look through the little window," and "sneeze into the sack (_éternuer dans le sac_)." ------- Four months after the first trial of the "inimitable machine" Bicêtre paid its tribute of blood to the red days of September. In Bicêtre, as elsewhere in Paris, that Sunday, 2d of September, 1792, and the three days that followed were long remembered. "All France leaps distracted," says Carlyle, "like the winnowed Sahara waltzing in sand colonnades!" In Paris, "huge placards" going up on the walls, "all steeples clangouring, the alarm-gun booming from minute to minute, and lone Marat, the man forbid," seeing salvation in one thing only—in the fall of "two hundred and sixty thousand aristocrat heads." It was the beginning or presage of the Terror. The hundred hours' massacre in the prisons of Paris, beginning on the Sunday afternoon, may be reckoned with the hours of St. Bartholomew. "The tocsin is pealing its loudest, the clocks inaudibly striking three." The massacre of priests was just over at the Abbaye prison; and there, and at La Force, and at the Châtelet, and the Conciergerie, in each of these prisons the strangest court—which could not be called of justice but of revenge—was hurriedly got together, and prisoner after prisoner, fetched from his cell and swiftly denounced as a "royalist plotter," was thrust out into a "howling sea" of _sans-culottes_ and hewn to pieces under an arch of pikes and sabres. "Man after man is cut down," says Carlyle; "the sabres need sharpening, the killers refresh themselves from wine-jugs." Dr. Moore, author of the _Journal during a Residence in France_, came upon one of the scenes of butchery, grew sick at the sight, and "turned into another street." Not fewer than a thousand and eighty-nine were slaughtered in the prisons.