For a long time I believed—and I don’t know why—that to get to the guillotine you had to climb stairs onto a scaffold. I think it was because of the French Revolution—I mean, because of everything I’d been taught or shown about it. But one morning I remembered seeing a photograph that appeared in the papers at the time of a much-talked-about execution. In reality, the machine was set up right on the ground, as simple as you please.
