Mr. Charles F. Adams thus describes it:—“On the 8th of May, 1842, there
happened in France one of the most famous and horrible railroad
slaughters ever recorded. It was the birthday of the king, Louis
Phillipe, and, in accordance with the usual practice, the occasion had
been celebrated at Versailles by a great display of the fountains. At
half-past five o’clock these had stopped playing, and a general rush
ensued for the trains then about to leave for Paris. That which went by
the road along the left bank of the Seine was densely crowded, and was so
long that it required two locomotives to draw it. As it was moving at a
high rate of speed between Bellevue and Menden, the axle of the foremost
of these two locomotives broke, letting the body of the engine drop to
the ground. It instantly stopped, and the second locomotive was then
driven by its impetus on top of the first, crushing its engineer and
fireman, while the contents of both the fire-boxes were scattered over
the roadway and among the _debris_. Three carriages crowded with
passengers were then piled on top of this burning mass, and there crushed
together into each other. The doors of the train were all locked, as was
then, and indeed is still, the custom in Europe, and it so chanced that
the carriages had all been newly painted. They blazed up like pine
kindlings. Some of the carriages were so shattered that a portion of
those in them were enabled to extricate themselves, but no less than
forty were held fast; and of these such as were not so fortunate as to be
crushed to death in the first shock perished hopelessly in the flames
before the eyes of a throng of impotent lookers-on. Some fifty-two or
fifty-three persons were supposed to have lost their lives in this
disaster, and more than forty others were injured; the exact number of
the killed, however, could never be ascertained, as the telescoping of
the carriages on top of the two locomotives had made of the destroyed
portion of the train a visible holocaust of the most hideous description.
Not only did whole families perish together—in one case no less than
eleven members of the same family sharing a common fate—but the remains
of such as were destroyed could neither be identified nor separated. In
one case a female foot was alone recognisable, while in others the bodies
were calcined and fused into an undistinguishable mass. The Academy of
Sciences appointed a committee to inquire whether Admiral D’Urville, a
distinguished French navigator, was among the victims. His body was
thought to be found, but it was so terribly mutilated that it could be
recognized only by a sculptor, who chanced some time before to have taken
a phrenological cast of his skull. His wife and only son had perished
with him.
“It is not easy now to conceive the excitement and dismay which this
catastrophe caused throughout France. The new invention was at once
associated in the minds of an excitable people with novel forms of
imminent death. France had at best been laggard enough in its adoption
of the new appliance, and now it seemed for a time as if the Versailles
disaster was to operate as a barrier in the way of all further railroad
development. Persons availed themselves of the steam roads already
constructed as rarely as possible, and then in fear and trembling, while
steps were taken to substitute horse for steam power on other roads then
in process of construction.”