French Riviera arriving on the Côte d'Azur. Edith Wharton wrote "The Age of Innocence" (1920) at a villa near Hyères, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the novel (the first woman to do so). Dancer Isadora Duncan frequented Cannes and Nice, but died in 1927 when her scarf caught in a wheel of the Amilcar motor car in which she was a passenger and strangled her. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald first visited with his wife Zelda in 1924, stopping at Hyères, Cannes and Monte Carlo – eventually staying at Saint-Raphaël, where he wrote much of "The Great Gatsby" and began "Tender is
Breaking wheel helpless victim. Eventually, shock and dehydration caused death. In France, a special grace, the "retentum", could be granted, by which the condemned was strangled after the second or third blow, or in special cases, even before the breaking began. In the Holy Roman Empire, the wheel was punishment reserved primarily for men convicted of aggravated murder (murder committed during another crime, or against a family member). Less severe offenders would be cudgelled "top down", with a lethal first blow to the neck. More heinous criminals were punished "bottom up", starting with the legs, and sometimes being beaten for hours. The