hours had passed,—rather more than two hours in the light of the candles (it was now eight in the evening),—the time for the supreme ordeal was come; his family were to be admitted.

For some weeks now he had been separated from them. They had been imprisoned in the rooms above. His demand for three days had been rejected. He was to die upon the morrow, but he was to be permitted to see his own before he died, and to discuss with his confessor what he nobly called “the great business” of our passage from this life.

There gave upon the stair facing the narrow stone staircase of the Temple a great oaken door, studded with many huge old nails. It opened, and the queen came in. God! what must we not imagine her to have seemed in that moment, this woman who had so despised him, and yet had been faithful to him, and had principally ruined him; and who had, in these last months, so marvellously changed and grown in soul. The queen came in falteringly. She held by the hand her rickety little son; her somewhat dull little daughter (the elder of the two children) followed. The king’s sister, the Princess Elizabeth, of a different and more simple bearing, and of a soul longer tried and longer purified, came in more erect, the last of the four.

The king sat down and put his wife upon his left, his sister upon his right. He took the boy, the last heir of the Capetian monarchy, and stood him between his knees, and told him in a clear manner and in a low and even tone the duties of a Christian in the difficult matter of revenge, that it must be foregone. He lifted up the boy’s little right hand to give to this direction the sanctity of an oath.

It seems that few words were spoken during that terrible time. The queen clung to him somewhat. He mastered himself well. Altogether these three and the two children were assembled for nearly two hours. A little before ten he himself determined that the agony must end.

Marie Antoinette, as was her custom under stress, broke out into passionate protestation. Then she checked herself and admitted doom. But she implored him that they should see him again, and he said to her, perhaps unwisely, that he would see her before he left for his passing. He would see her in the morning at the hour when he was summoned to go. She would have it earlier still.

He said it should be earlier by half an hour. She made him promise solemnly enough, and he promised her. Ten o’clock had struck, and the chimes were sounding over Paris and from the great clock of the Temple before she unloosed her hands.

He stood. The women passed out with weak knees (it is said that the girl was half fainting). The oaken door shut behind them, and the iron door outside it clanged to. He heard their soft steps, slow and creaking, mounting the winding stone stairs without. Then they were lost, and he was in silence. He prayed a moment and then lay down to sleep. He slept deeply till five in the morning. The men bringing in the vessels for a Mass awoke him. He rose and prayed.

In the full darkness, before it was yet six o’clock, the queen heard a step approaching up the stairs. It could not be the king. She watched from above her candle. It was a messenger come for books of devotion which the king required at his mass and communion. Then she heard the chimes of seven, and the day was breaking; upon her window the falling mist had made a blur, and it was very cold. She waited on until eight o’clock. There was no sound. Her agony was unrelieved. Yet another hour, and she heard steps and the coming and going of many men upon the stone stairs below. No one came up. The sounds sank away. The great door that gave into the courtyard was heard creaking upon its hinges, there was the pawing of horses upon the stones, and the cries of command to the escort, a certain confused noise from the crowd outside the walls. The tower was empty. She had not seen the king.

The king had passed through the prison door. He had gone on foot, with the priest by his side, across the little court to the high wall which surrounded the tower. The guards followed him.

Just before he came to the barrier he turned back to look at the prison. He made a slight gesture as of constraint, and firmly turned again toward the gate.

Outside this the guards were drawn up, and a roomy carriage of the sort that was then hired in the streets by the wealthy stood at the entrance. Two policemen armed with muskets were awaiting him at the carriage door. As Louis appeared, one of these men got in and took his seat with his back to the horses. Then the king entered, sitting in his proper place upon the right, facing him, and motioned to the priest, Edgeworth, to sit beside him. When they were both thus seated, the second policeman took his place opposite, and he and his colleague set their guns before them. The door was shut, the cab started at a foot’s pace.

As they came out on the broad streets (for they followed the boulevards), they could see upon each side of the way, three or four ranks deep, the soldiery and militia which guarded those trod miles through the town. There was no crowd on the pavement behind the ranks of soldiers, or at least but few spectators, and a curious observer might have noted how few and rare were the uniforms, how many of the thousands aligned were clothed in workman’s dress or in the mere remnants of military coats. Even the windows of the uneven houses they passed (the boulevards were then but half built) gaped empty, and no one stood at the doors.

Before the carriage marched a great multitude of men, all enregimented in some sort of troop, and the greater part of them drummers. These last drummed incessantly, so that this long and very slow procession was confused and deafened with a loud and ceaseless sound. Paris heard that sound rolling up afar from the eastward, crashing past its houses, lost again toward the west.

It was close upon eleven o’clock when the carriage came before the unfinished columns of the Madeleine and turned into the Rue Royale.

Louis was reading from a book the Psalms which his confessor had pointed out to him when he noticed that the carriage had stopped. He looked up, turned to the priest, and said in a low voice:

“Unless I am mistaken, we are there?” The priest did not answer.

They had come to that wide open space which is now called the Place de la Concorde, and as he looked quietly through the windows, the doomed man perceived a great throng of people densely packed about a sort of square of cannon which surrounded the scaffold and guillotine. That fatal woodwork and the machine it bore stood near the entrance of the Rue Royale and a little to the east. One of the executioners (who stood at the foot of the scaffold) took the handle of the carriage door to open it. Louis stopped him and, putting one hand on the priest’s knee before he got out, said:

“Sirs, I recommend you this gentleman here.

See to it that after my death no insult shall be offered him.”

They said nothing in reply, but when the king would have continued, one of them cried:

“Oh, yes, yes. We will see to it. Leave it to us.”

The king opened the door, and came out into the freshness of that damp air. Above, the sky was still quite gray and low, but the misty drizzle had ceased. They made as though to take off his coat and his collar. He moved them aside, and himself disembarrassed his neck. Then one came forward with a cord and took his hands.

“What are you at?” he cried.

“We must bind you,” said the man.

“Bind me!” answered the king. “I will never allow it! Fulfil your orders, but you shall not bind me!”

There was a struggle in which he turned to the priest as though for counsel or for aid, but they bound his hands behind him.

The few steps up to the scaffold were very steep. The Abbé Edgeworth supported him so bound, and thought for a moment, as he felt the weight upon his arm, that the prisoner was losing courage. But even as he turned to glance furtively at the king, in that crisis Louis had strengthened himself, and stood upright upon the broad stage. With a few rapid and determined steps he took his way toward the guillotine, standing to the right of the instrument. Some yards in front of him and below, a score of drummers were at the ready with sticks lifted, balanced as drummers balance them between the knuckles of the hand. He cried out, standing erect with his stout figure and heavy, impassive face, “I die innocent of all the——” at which moment there came a sudden cry of command, and the drums beat furiously. To that sound he died; and those who were present relate that immediately afterward there arose from the great mob about, which had hitherto held its breath, a sort of loud moaning, not in anger or in hatred, but in astonishment of the spectacle and of things to come.

The End.

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