Couthon, Georges, a violent revolutionary, one of a triumvirate with Robespierre and St. Just, who would expel every one from the Jacobin Club who could not give evidence of having done something to merit hanging, should a counter-revolution arrive; was paralysed in his limbs from having had to spend a night “sunk to the middle in a cold peat bog” to escape detection as a seducer; trapped for the guillotine; tried to make away with himself under a table, but could not (1756‒1794).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Couston * Coutts, Thomas