But here, when the bitterness of death was almost passed, occurred a difficulty.  Two of the leaders wanted to have the execution in a little inner courtyard, shut in by blank walls.  So the procession was again formed, marched through long passages and up stairways, and halted while keys were searched for, before it came to the spot.  On the way, a man crept up to the archbishop, uttering blasphemies into his ear.  The good man’s mild look of reproof and pain so moved one of the sub-officers that he drove the man off, saying:  “We are here to shoot these men, not to insult them.”

The six victims were at last placed in a line, with their backs to the wall.  As Ferre was giving the order to fire, the archbishop raised his right hand in order to give, as his last act, his episcopal blessing.  As he did so, Lolive exclaimed:  “That’s your benediction is it?—­now take mine!” and shot the old man through the body with a revolver.  All were shot dead at once, save M. Bonjean.

There is now a marble slab in the little court inscribed with their names, and headed:  “Respect this place, which witnessed the death of noble men and martyrs.”  The warder, Henrion, was put in charge of the place, and planted it with beds of flowers.

The execution over, the leaders searched the cells of their victims.  In most of them they found nothing; in two were worn cassocks, and in the archbishop’s was his pastoral ring.  One of the party said the amethyst in it was a diamond; another contradicted him, and said it was an emerald.  The bodies lay unburied until two o’clock in the morning, when four or five of those who had shot them despoiled them, one hanging the archbishop’s chain and cross about his own neck, another appropriating his silver shoe-buckles.  Then they loaded the bodies on a hand-barrow and carried them to an open trench dug in Pere la Chaise.  There, four days later, when the Versaillais had full possession of the city, they were found.  The archbishop and the Abbe Duguerrey were taken to the archbishop’s house with a guard of honor, and are buried at Notre Dame.  The two Jesuit fathers were buried in their own cemetery, and Judge Bonjean and the hospital chaplain sleep in honored graves in Pere la Chaise.

After these executions a large number of so-called “hostages,”—­ecclesiastics, soldiers of the line, sergents de ville, and police agents remained shut up in La Roquette.  It was Saturday, May 27, the day before Whit Sunday.  Says the Abbe Lamazou,—­

“It was a few minutes past three, and I was kneeling in my cell saying my prayers for the day, when I heard bolts rattling in the corridor.  We were no longer locked in with keys.  Suddenly the door of my cell was thrown open, and a voice cried:  ’Courage! our time has come.’  ‘Yes, courage!’ I answered.  ‘God’s will be done.’  I had on my ecclesiastical habit, and went out into the corridor.  There I found a mixed crowd of prisoners, priests, soldiers,