Victims of The Blast
Napoleon was badly shaken, but he had escaped the machine infernale blast physically unscathed. When he reached the Opéra he received a standing ovation from the audience. The explosion, however, killed several innocent bystanders. How many is unclear. One scholar believed that “a dozen persons were killed, and twenty-eight were wounded” in the blast. Another thought that “nine innocent people died and twenty-six were injured.” A third scholar wrote that the bomb killed two people and injured six people gravely (and others lightly). The bomb killed the fourteen-year-old girl, Pensol, who had been paid by Saint-Régeant to hold the mare hitched to the cart carrying the bomb, and, of course the old mare. “A woman standing at her shop door to cheer Napoleon had her breasts ripped off; another was blinded.” There were also some other medical effects. Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, fainted. Her daughter Hortense’s hand was lacerated. Napoleon’s sister, Caroline Murat, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy, and whose emotional health was less than robust, was severely traumatized. She became anxious and depressed. The son she bore in January 1801, Achille Murat, reportedly suffered from epilepsy. Later Caroline had three more children.
Read more about this topic: Plot Of The Rue Saint-Nicaise
Famous quotes containing the words victims of the, victims of, victims and/or blast:
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919)
“He was warned. And now he’s paid. Let him be buried with the other victims of human greed and folly.”
—Cyril Hume, and Fred McLeod Wilcox. Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon)
“Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When autonomy is respected, the two-year-old does not carry this unfinished task into later stages of growth. In adolescence, the youngster will again concentrate on independence, but he won’t have to blast the roof off the second time around if it is already well established.”
—Dorothy Corkville Briggs (20th century)