From the diary of Felix Platter, a Swiss youth studying in Montpellier, France. It is not completely evident from context (“afterwards …”) whether the masked dummy was “executed” on the same occasion as the coiner, or whether that effigy was punished on a different day.
On the next day [after a September 28 execution] a false coiner was hanged in the same place. The gibbet was not vety high and had only one arm.
Afterwards a masked dummy was brought on a hurdle, and was laid on the cross and its limbs broken, as I have described. This dummy represented a Greek who had studied at Montpellier and had been accounted one of the keenest blades of the town. He had married Gillette d’Andrieu, a girl of doubtful reputation, who had neither beauty nor fortune. She had a very long nose, and her lover could scarcely manage to kiss her on the lips, especially since he too had a nose of respectable size.
The Greek was insulted by a canon, Pierre Saint-Ravy, who taunted him, at the moment when he was about to relieve himself, of having had intercourse with his wife. The husband at once stabbed the canon and fled; he could therefore be executed only in effigy. His wife continued to live in Montpellier, and was often in Rondelet’s house she was a relative of his.*
She often came there to dance, and one day I danced with her, all booted and spurred, on my return from Vendargues. As I turned, my spurs entangled themselves in her dress, and I fell full length on the floor. Some tablets I had in a breast pocket were broken into pieces, and I was so stunned that I had to be helped up.
* Guillaume Rondelet was one of Platter’s instructors, a professor of medicine. He had been friends with Rabelais and has the distinction of appearing in Gargantua and Pantagruel under the name Rondibilis.
Part of the Daily Double: Felix Platter’s Diary.
On this day..
- 1832: William Hodkin, child rapist
- 1995: Navarat Maykha, accidental smuggler
- 1972: Helenira Rezende, Brazil guerrilla
- 1848: Harris Bell
- 1891: Ed Leeper and James Powell
- 1469: Humphrey and Charles Neville, Lancastrians
- 1893: Scuffletonians in Mt. Vernon, Georgia
- 1939: Pete Catalina and Angelo Agnes, Colorado murderers
- 1915: Thomas and Meeks Griffin, ancestors of Tom Joyner
- 1941: Babi Yar massacre begins
- 1503: Anacaona and the caciques of Xaragua
- 1979: Francisco MacĂas Nguema, President for Life