At the Restoration in 1814, diligent search was made for the ashes of the King and Queen in the cemetery, on the site of which was subsequently erected an Expiatory Chapel. Some half calcined bones and a few scraps of cloth and linen were found; and these last having been identified by experts as having been part of the apparel of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the relics with a considerable quantity of the surrounding earth, were inhumed with much pomp and solemnity, in the Royal Vault of the Cathedral of St. Denis. Touching the executioner, it may be expedient to record that Marie Antoinette was guillotined, not by Charles Henri Sanson, who beheaded Louis XVI, but by his son, Henri, who died in Paris in 1840, aged seventy-three. The elder Sanson died only a few weeks after he had executed Louis, and the Royalist historians maintain that his death was hastened by remorse for the deed which he had been constrained to commit, and that in his will he bequeathed a considerable sum for the celebration of an annual Expiatory Mass. But this is very doubtful. It has been shown, however, without the possibility of doubt, that the Sanson family were of Florentine origin, and that the ancestors of Charles Henri and of Henri Sanson came to France in the train of Catherine de Medicis. For two hundred years, without intermission, had members of this gloomy historic family been executioners in ordinary to the city of Paris. In addition to Marie Antoinette, the younger Sanson decapitated the Queen’s sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth, and the eloquent advocate, Malesherbes, who undertook the defence of Louise XVI. He likewise beheaded the Duke of Orléans (Philippe Égalité), and last, but not least, Maximilien Robespierre. The so-called _Memoirs of the Sanson Family_ are more than half suspected to be mainly apocryphal, and to have been written by one D’Olbreuse, a bookseller’s hack; and, according to a writer in the Paris _Temps_, in 1875 the last of the Sansons was a remarkably mild, flaccid and stupid old gentleman, who was certainly incapable of writing any “Memoirs” whatever, since his own memory was hopelessly decayed, and whose circumstances in his old age became so embarrassed that he was arrested for debt, and confined in the prison of Clichy, whence he only procured his enlargement by _pawning the guillotine itself_ for 4,000 francs!