From the February 21, 1909 New York Times:

“Paris–Since the guillotine has been revived in France the proprietor of a small Parisian café invented a new method of drumming up trade. He arranged a miniature guillotine, and for the price of one drink you could have the pleasure of seeing a puppet’s head roll off into a basket.

As Frenchmen seem to revel in executions, and as real ones are more or less rare since the new law went into effect, and there has been none in Paris itself, this clever invention had much success.

One puppet’s head was placed in the stock and the knife fell as in a real execution. Other puppets were standing about to represent the officers of the law. The proprietor of this café told me that the device had been worth a great deal of money to him, as all day long workmen came in for drinks and asked to see ‘La Veuve,’ as the guillotine is called in France, at work; but at the end of the week he was forced to put up a sign which read: ‘By Order of Police, There Will Be No More Guillotinging Here; so henceforth the real executions will have no rivals.”