The drums are beating:  “Taisez-vous, Silence!” he cries ’in a terrible voice, d’une voix terrible.’  He mounts the scaffold, not without delay; he is in puce coat, breeches of grey, white stockings.  He strips off the coat; stands disclosed in a sleeve-waistcoat of white flannel.  The Executioners approach to bind him:  he spurns, resists; Abbe Edgeworth has to remind him how the Saviour, in whom men trust, submitted to be bound.  His hands are tied, his head bare; the fatal moment is come.  He advances to the edge of the Scaffold, ‘his face very red,’ and says:  “Frenchmen, I die innocent:  it is from the Scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell you so.  I pardon my enemies; I desire that France—­” A General on horseback, Santerre or another, prances out with uplifted hand:  “Tambours!” The drums drown the voice.  “Executioners do your duty!” The Executioners, desperate lest themselves be murdered (for Santerre and his Armed Ranks will strike, if they do not), seize the hapless Louis:  six of them desperate, him singly desperate, struggling there; and bind him to their plank.  Abbe Edgeworth, stooping, bespeaks him:  “Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven.”  The Axe clanks down; a King’s Life is shorn away.  It is Monday the 21st of January 1793.  He was aged Thirty-eight years four months and twenty-eight days. (Newspapers, Municipal Records, &c. &c. in Hist.  Parl. xxiii. 298-349) Deux Amis (ix. 369-373), Mercier (Nouveau Paris, iii. 3-8.)

Executioner Samson shews the Head:  fierce shout of Vive la Republique rises, and swells; caps raised on bayonets, hats waving:  students of the College of Four Nations take it up, on the far Quais; fling it over Paris.  Orleans drives off in his cabriolet; the Townhall Councillors rub their hands, saying, “It is done, It is done.”  There is dipping of handkerchiefs, of pike-points in the blood.  Headsman Samson, though he afterwards denied it, (His Letter in the Newspapers, Hist.  Parl. ubi supra.) sells locks of the hair:  fractions of the puce coat are long after worn in rings. (Forster’s Briefwechsel, i. 473.)—­And so, in some half-hour it is done; and the multitude has all departed.  Pastrycooks, coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial quotidian cries:  the world wags on, as if this were a common day.  In the coffeehouses that evening, says Prudhomme, Patriot shook hands with Patriot in a more cordial manner than usual.  Not till some days after, according to Mercier, did public men see what a grave thing it was.

A grave thing it indisputably is; and will have consequences.  On the morrow morning, Roland, so long steeped to the lips in disgust and chagrin, sends in his demission.  His accounts lie all ready, correct in black-on-white to the uttermost farthing:  these he wants but to have audited, that he might retire to remote obscurity to the country and his books.  They will never be audited those accounts; he will never get retired thither.