1. The name given to the morgue situated in the basement of the Châtelet.
2. A card game in which the banker plays alone against any number of players.
3. A meal in which the meat course and the dessert are served at the same time.
1. The Jansenists represented Christ with arms unopened on the Cross.
2. The medical service for the French navy was founded in 1689 and was largely made up of surgeons. Doctors, holders of degrees in medicine, were trained in the universities whereas navy surgeons were trained in schools of surgery in Rochefort, Toulon and Brest. Throughout the eighteenth century doctors attempted to prevent surgeons from practising medicine or even tending the sick.
3. L. Batalli. Italian doctor and author of De Curatione per sanguinis missionem (1537).
4. G. Patin (1605–1672). Professor of medicine at the Collège de France.
1. First mentioned in Europe in 1533, this tuber was introduced into Spain in 1570, and later into Italy, Germany and Ireland. Present in France from 1616 onwards, the potato became a source of controversy: it was claimed to cause leprosy. It was Parmentier (1737–1813) who popularised the vegetable during the reign of Louis XVI. The King was said to eat some at every meal.
2. The doctors and surgeons of the criminal courts of the Châtelet were on duty one week in four.
3. Robert François Damiens (1715–1757). A soldier, then a domestic servant, he struck Louis XV an inoffensive blow with a pen-knife to remind him of the duties of his office. His punishment was commensurate with the fear felt by the Sovereign, who in the moments following the attack thought he had been mortally wounded. The author has taken numerous details from the well-researched study by Martin Monestier, Peines de mort. Histoire et techniques des exécutions capitales des origines à nos jours, Paris, 1994.
4. Casanova, who witnessed the execution from a window overlooking Place de Grève, has left a graphic account of it.
5. Charles Henri Sanson’s words are all the more remarkable since it was he who executed Louis XVI on 21 January 1793. He resigned his office immediately after this execution and set up a foundation for the annual celebration of a Mass of Atonement in the church of Saint-Laurent.
6. The buildings referred to are the symmetrical mansions of the Ambassadeurs Extraordinaires, later to become Hôtel de Crillon and Hôtel de la Marine.
1. A famous eighteenth-century case. The Duchesse de Gesvres attempted to have her marriage annulled because of her husband’s impotence. The case had still not been settled at the time of her death in 1717.
2. Aphrodisiacs used in the eighteenth century. An excessive amount of powder of cantharides (a tropical fly) could prove fatal.
1. (1702–1766). A French general of Irish descent. After the failure of the siege of Madras, he capitulated at Pondicherry after heroically defending it. He was accused of treason, sentenced to death and executed. His son obtained his rehabilitation with the help of Voltaire.
2. (1711–1794). The Chancellor of Austria.
3. The ‘good lady’ here refers to Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour.
4. Frederick II, King of Prussia.
5. A French defeat in which Frederick II crushed Marshal Soubise and the forces of the Holy Roman Empire.
6. (1684–1770). A financier and friend of Madame de Pompadour.
1. A fashionable Paris innkeeper.
1. During the ancien régime, people who committed suicide were sometimes tried and even sentenced to be hanged on the gibbet and their family disgraced. Even if this practice had gradually disappeared, traces of it remained in the popular consciousness.
2. ‘Since you are a great judge, Monseigneur Saint-Yves de la Vérité, listen to me.’
3. Violinist and composer (1713–1797). he was Superintendent of the Royal Music in 1764 and a member of the French Royal Academy of Music, of which he was three times director.
1. A product used instead of soap for doing the washing.
2. ‘Contemptuous of wealth, firm in virtue and steadfast in the face of fear.’ (Tacitus, Annals, Book IV, 5).
3. (1727–1799). A French composer and organist.
4. The most famous dungeons in the Châtelet. As early as 1670 Louis XIV had decreed that ‘the prisons of the Châtelet should be healthy’ but it was Louis XVI who decided to abolish them in 1780.
5. The coat of arms of Antoine Gabriel de Sartine. Recently ennobled (Comte d’Alby) he wanted them to include a representation of the fish formerly sold by one of his ancestors, a grocer, which sounded like his patronym.
1. Glass paste imitating precious stones.
2. (1709–1767). The Comptroller General of Finance in 1759. He launched the fashion for portraits obtained by tracing the outline of a profile and filling in the whole with black.
3. During Carnival children were accustomed to marking passers-by with a piece of cloth cut into the shape of a rat and rubbed in chalk.
4. (1734–1794). Louis XVI’s First Groom, then a farmer-general. He died at the guillotine during the Terror.
5. Just like a corpse.
1. (1725–1793). Son of the Comte de Toulouse, himself the legitimate son of Louis XIV. He succeeded his father in this office in 1734.
2. A cart for transporting a cannon.
1. Where preliminary torture was carried out during the preparation of a criminal trial, and where those accused of criminal offences were imprisoned.
2. A cheap material made of light wool.
3. Pensées, I, 23.
1. A convent situated in Rue de Charenton in Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where young foreign girls of noble birth were brought up.
1. (1715–1771). A French philosopher. He was a farmer-general and contributed to the Encyclopédie.
2. At the time there were many rumours of attempts either by Austria or Prussia to bribe Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s favourite. Frederick II had asked his sister, the Margravine of Bayreuth, to approach the lady at Versailles via an emissary, her Grand Chamberlain the Chevalier de Mirabeau.
1. A hunting coat worn at Versailles. Each hunting ground and each type of hunt would have a particular coat.
2. The Master of Ceremonies.
3. There were two paintings by Van Loo (an ostrich hunt and a bear hunt), two by Parrocel (an elephant hunt and a buffalo hunt), two by Boucher (a tiger hunt and a crocodile hunt), one by De Troy (a lion hunt), one by Lancret (a leopard hunt) and one by Pater (a Chinese hunting scene). Most of these paintings are now on display in the Museum of Amiens.
4. In 1757 the Breton nobility mobilised against raids by the British.
5. The grey hunting coat worn by beginners.
6. Palais Mazarin.