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Gloves for the Host. Clément's downfall carried his family with him. The French government fired all provincial executioners and appointed a single Monsieur de Paris to perform the function. In 1879 the honor fell to one Louis Deibier, heir of a long line of Breton headsmen. Deibler was succeeded by his son Anatole, who ruled the guillotine with honor until 1939. He was succeeded by his nephew, Jules Henri Desfourneaux.
Jules came to office in troublous times. His decapitation of the nightclub slayer Eugene Weidmann was accompanied by such a burst of newsmen's flashbulbs and sob sisters' ink that public executions were barred thenceforth. Once he was arrested on suspicion of being a German paratrooper when his portable guillotine got lost. Thanks to the occupying Germans' zeal for capital punishment, however, he managed to pile up a post-Sanson record of 316 beheadings during his career.
But, unlike his great predecessors, Jules Desfourneaux lacked the grand manner. After each job, he economically removed the cords that bound his victims and stuffed them in his pocket for use on further occasions. His work made him nervous, and he often took roundabout routes to a date for fear of assassins or kidnapers. He was a quiet little man, known to few, but those few always noticed that when he took Communion at church, he pulled on his gloves to receive the host while others took theirs off. In 1934, his only son was drowned. Some say it was in suicidal flight from the prospect of following his father's profession.
Last week at 73, Jules himself died quietly of a heart attack, alone in his Paris apartment. Now that another guillotine dynasty had ended, his successor would probably be either of his chief assistants, the one who is a butcher by trade or the one who is a barber.