result in accidents, and the victims themselves were likely to resort to acts of desperation during the lengthy, unpredictable procedures. Legacy Sanson's eldest son Gabriel (1767–1792) had been his assistant and heir apparent from 1790, but he died after slipping off a scaffold as he displayed a severed head to the crowd. With his death, the hereditary obligation fell to the youngest son. In April 1793, he handed over his office, de facto, to Henri Sanson (1767-1840), who held it until his death in 1840, a total of 47 years. Henri guillotined Marie Antoinette and the chief prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville (1795), among many others. The Memories of Sanson are the apocryphal memoirs attributed to Charles-Henri Sanson. Published in 1830, they were written partially by Honoré de Balzac. In 1847, the last representative of the family Henry-Clément Sanson, decided, after money problems due to the gambling, to return to the text and to a supplement, under the title: Seven generations of executors, Memories of the executioner Sanson, published in 1862. Henri Clément (Henry-Clément) was the sixth and last executioner in the family. He held the office since the 1830's as an assistant, and officially from 1840 to 1847. The 159-year-long term of the family Sanson ended. In the late 1840s the Tussaud brothers Joseph and Francis, gathering relics for Madame Tussauds wax museum, visited the aged Henry-Clément Sanson and secured parts of one of the original guillotines used during the Age of Terror. The executioner had "pawned his guillotine, and got into woeful trouble for alleged trafficking in municipal property". Fictionalised accounts Novels Charles-Henri's life is heavily and rather inaccurately fictionalised in German author Hans Mahner-Mons's novel Der Kavalier von Paris (E. The Sword of Satan) (1954). Charles-Henri Sanson appears as a minor but significant character in Hilary Mantel's novel A Place of Greater Safety (1992). Charles-Henri Sanson is a recurring character in the detective story series Nicolas Le Floch (first volume published in 2000). Jim Shepard's story "Sans Farine", from his collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway (2007), presents a fictionalised autobiography of Charles-Henri Sanson. He is a secondary character, playing the part of the Harvester, a being who capture the souls of criminals, in the series Le Manoir (The manor) by Évelyne Brisou-Pellen (first volume published in 2013). Charles-Henri Sanson is the protagonist in the historical novel The Executioner's Heir by Susanne Alleyn (2013). In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles