She was racked with interrogations, and returned to the prison, weeping at the infernal imputations which they cast upon her womanhood.  On the day of her final trial she dressed herself in spotless white, and let fall the voluminous masses of her brown, abundant hair.  She was asked to betray her husband by disclosing his hiding place.  Her answer is full of wifely loyalty and dignity—­“Whether I know it or not I neither ought nor will say.”

There was absolutely no evidence against her except of her affiliations with the Girondists.  The mockery ended by her condemnation to death within twenty-four hours, and this Iphigenia of France went doomed back to her cell.  Her return was awaited with dreadful anxiety by her associates in confinement, who hoped against hope for her safe deliverance.  As she passed through the massive doors, she smiled, and drew her hand knife-like across her neck, and then there went up a wail from all assembled there, the wail of titled women, of sacred nuns, of magdalens and thieves, a dirge of inconsolable sorrow, of humanity weeping for its best beloved child.

Late in the afternoon of November 8, 1693, the rude cart which was to bear her to the guillotine received her.  She was dressed in white; her hair fell like a mantle to her knees.  The chilly air and her own courage brought back to her prison-blanched cheek the rosy hues of youth.  She spoke words of divine patience to the crowd which surged around her on her way and reviled her.  With a few low words she raised the courage of a terror-stricken old man who took with her the same last journey, and made him smile.  As the hours wore into twilight, she passed the home of her youth, and perhaps longed to become a little child again and enter there and be at rest.  At the foot of the scaffold she asked for pen and paper to bequeath to posterity the thoughts which crowded upon her; they were refused, and thus was one of the books of the sibyls lost.  She bowed to the great statue of Liberty near by, exclaiming, “O Liberte! comme on t’ a jouee!"[2] and gave her majestic form to the headsman to be bound upon the plank.

The knife fell, and the world darkened upon the death of the queenliest woman who ever lived and loved.—­EX-GOVERNOR C.K.  DAVIS, of Minnesota.

    What though the triumph of thy fond forecasting
      Lingers till earth is fading from thy sight? 
    Thy part with Him whose arms are everlasting,
      Is not forsaken in a hopeless night.

    Paul was begotten in the death of Stephen;
      Fruitful through time shall be that precious blood: 
    No morning yet has ever worn to even
      And missed the glory of its crimson flood.

    There is a need of all the blood of martyrs,
      Forevermore the eloquence of God;
    And there is need of him who never barters
      His patience in that desert way the Master trod.

    What mean the strange, hard words, “through tribulation?”
      O Man of sorrows, only Thou canst tell,
    And such as in Thy life’s humiliation,
      Have oft been with Thee, ay, have known Thee well.