hope for others, and can look forward to the prospect of those whom she loves being hereafter united in freedom and happiness.  She thought, it may be, that her own death would be the last sacrifice that her enemies would require.  And for even her enemies and murderers she had a word of pardon, and could address a message of mercy for them to her son, who, she trusted, might yet some day have power to show that mercy she enjoined, or to execute the vengeance which with her last breath she deprecated.

She threw herself on her bed and fell asleep.  At seven she was roused by the executioner.  The streets were already thronged with a fierce and sanguinary mob, whose shouts of triumph were so vociferous that she asked one of her jailers whether they would tear her to pieces.  She was assured that, as he expressed it, they would do her no harm.  And indeed the Jacobins themselves would have protected her from the populace, so anxious were they to heap on her every indignity that would render death more terrible.  Louis had been allowed to quit the Temple in his carriage.  Marie Antoinette was to be drawn from the prison to the scaffold in a common cart, seated on a bare plank; the executioner by her side, holding the cords with which her hands were already bound.  With a refinement of barbarity, those who conducted the procession made it halt more than once, that the people might gaze upon her, pointing her out to the mob with words and gestures of the vilest insult.  She heard them not; her thoughts were with God:  her lips were uttering nothing but prayers.  Once for a moment, as she passed in sight of the Tuileries, she was observed to cast an agonized look toward its towers, remembering, perhaps, how reluctantly she had quit it fourteen months before.  It was midday before the cart reached the scaffold.  As she descended, she trod on the executioner’s foot.  It might seem to have been ordained that her very last words might be words of courtesy.  “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “I did not do it on purpose;” and she added, “make haste.”  In a few moments all was over.

Her body was thrown into a pit in the common cemetery, and covered with quicklime to insure its entire destruction.  When, more than twenty years afterward, her brother-in-law was restored to the throne, and with pious affection desired to remove her remains and those of her husband to the time-honored resting-place of their royal ancestors at St. Denis, no remains of her who had once been the admiration of all beholders could be found beyond some fragments of clothing, and one or two bones, among which the faithful memory of Chateaubriand believed that he recognized the mouth whose sweet smile had been impressed on his memory since the day on which it acknowledged his loyalty on his first presentation, while still a boy, at Versailles.