Its been a while dear friends. Time for another "Today in history" On this date in 1625, Helene Gillet went to the scaffold in Dijon to suffer beheading for infanticide. But it was the executioner and not Helene who came down from it in pieces. Helene was the beautiful 21-year-old daughter of a royal chatelain, thanks to her status, she was entitled to the dignity of a beheading, rather than an ignoble dispatch by rope. But all else for Helene Gillet was shame: her father disowned her and forbade any intervention on her behalf; only Helen’s mother accompanied her to Dijon to appeal against the sentence. The scaffold on which the whole tragedy was to unfold was a permanent edifice. Its routine employment was attested by the permanent wooden palisade and the small stone chapel comprising the arena — features that would factor in the ensuing scene. Having positioned Gillet on the block, our troubled executioner raised up his ceremonial sword and brought it crashing down … on her left shoulder. The blow toppled the prisoner from the block, but she was quite alive. To cleanly strike through a living neck with a hand-swung blade — to do so under thousands of hostile eyes — was never a certain art. Hoots and missiles began pelting the platform as the pitiable condemned, matted with blood, struggled back to the block. One chop would do it: the struggling patient would still, the archer detail would restrain the angry crowd. Again the high executioner raised the blade and again arced it down on the young woman’s head — and again goggled in dismay. Somehow, the blow had been half-deflected by a knot of Helene Gillet’s hair, and nicked only a small gash in the supplicant’s neck. Having now seen the vulnerable youth survive two clumsy swipes, the crowd’s fury poured brickbats onto the stage in a flurry sufficient to drive the friars who accompanied the condemned to flee in fear for their own lives. The raging mob by this time had pushed through the guards and overrun the palisades. The executioner’s wife was ruthlessly torn to pieces, and the cowering executioner himself soon forced from his refuge to the same fate. Helene Gillet, who had survived a beheading, was hauled by her saviors bloody and near-senseless to a nearby surgeon, who tended her injuries and confirmed that none of them ought be fatal. The Parliament of Dijon received the royal pardon on June 2, and formally declared Helene Gillet’s official acquittal. The fortunate woman, having had a brush with the sublime, is said to have retired herself to a convent and lived out the best part of the 17th century there in prayer.