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)
“I don’t see black people as victims even though we are exploited. Victims are flat, one- dimensional characters, someone rolled over by a steamroller so you have a cardboard person. We are far more resilient and more rounded than that. I will go on showing there’s more to us than our being victimized. Victims are dead.”
—Kristin Hunter (b. 1931)
“I care not by what measure you end the war. If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America, whatever may be your object, depend upon it, as true as effect follows cause, that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers, and poison the fair fruits of freedom. Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.”
—Ernestine L. Rose (1810–1892)