This instrument was invented by a physician, Dr. Guillotin, to provide a humane method of capital punishment. Its victims would feel no pain he said; only a refreshing coolness! It was set up in various parts of the city. In the Place Louis XV, then called the Place de la Révolution, the scaffold was erected near the statue of Liberty to which Mme. Roland addressed her famous exclamation: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” Around it gathered a daily crowd, some, the industriously knitting women described in “A Tale of Two Cities,” who came as to a vaudeville performance; some, fanatics, equally joyous over the downfall of hated aristocrats or of plebeian “enemies of the Republic,” others, monsters who rejoiced in blood, no matter whose. Pitiful, indeed, were those who came day after day to watch the tumbrils approaching from the east through the rue Royale from the rue Saint Honoré for some friend whose appearance here might solve the mystery of an unexplained disappearance. In a little over two years two thousand and eight hundred people lost their heads in this place; one thousand three hundred were slain in six weeks in the Square of the Throne; scores more suffered in the small square where the Sun King had held his Carrousel, and yet others in the Grève before the City Hall. Even such slight semblance of the forms of justice as preceded the ride to the guillotine was denied to hundreds of people, many of them innocent of any fault. Almost a thousand of such victims were massacred in the early days of September following the incarceration of the royal family. Bands of authorized assassins held pretended court in the prisons and butchered the helpless prisoners. At the Abbaye, the old prison of the monastery of Saint Germain-des-Près, the unfortunates were killed in the square before the church. It was in this prison that Mme. Roland wrote the “Memoirs” that give us one of the most vivid contemporary pictures that we have of these awful days. Here, too, Charlotte Corday spent the days between her murder of Marat and her passage to the guillotine.