I intend to remain at Paris until after the marriage ceremony of the Duke and Duchess of Berri, and I shall then proceed to Lausanne.  It is expected there will be some disturbance on the occasion of this marriage.

I have witnessed an execution by the guillotine on the Place de Greve near the Hotel de Ville.  The criminal was guilty of a burglary and murder.  It is the only execution (except political ones) that has taken place at Paris for the last six months, whereas in England they are strung up by dozens every fortnight.  Independent of there being far less crimes committed in France than in England, the French code punishes but few offences with death.

Why is not the sanguinary English criminal code with death in every line—­why is it not reformed, I say?  ’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.