Personal Life
Sanson's hobbies included the dissection of his victims and the production of medicines using herbs he grew in his garden. In his free time he liked to play the violin and cello, listened to Christoph Willibald Gluck, and often met with his longtime friend Tobias Schmidt, a well-regarded German maker of musical instruments who would later build Sanson's guillotine.
An anecdote reports that Charles-Henri Sanson after his retirement met Napoléon Bonaparte and was asked if he could still sleep well after having executed more than three thousand people. Sanson's laconic answer was, "If emperors, kings and dictators can sleep well, why shouldn't an executioner?"
Read more about this topic: Charles Henri Sanson
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“We shall make mistakes, but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principles. I remember that my old school master Dr. Peabody said in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled, he said things in life will not always run smoothly, sometimes we will be rising toward the heights and all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great thing to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)