Noon had just struck.  Bailly addressed a last and tender adieu to his companions in captivity, wished them a better fate, followed the executioner without weakness as well as without bravado, mounted the fatal cart, his hands tied behind his back.  Our colleague was accustomed to say:  “We must entertain a bad opinion of those who, in their dying moments, have not a look to cast behind them.”  Bailly’s last look was towards his wife.  A gendarme of the escort feelingly listened to his last words, and faithfully repeated them to his widow.  The procession reached the entrance to the Champ de Mars, on the side towards the river, at a quarter past one o’clock.  This was the place where, according to the words of the sentence, the scaffold had been raised.  The blinded crowd collected there, furiously exclaimed that the sacred ground of the Champ de la Federation should not be soiled by the presence and by the blood of him whom they called a great criminal.  Upon their demand (I had almost said their orders), the scaffold was taken down again, and carried piecemeal into one of the fosses, where it was put up afresh.  Bailly remained the stern witness of these frightful preparations, and of these infernal clamours.  Not one complaint escaped from his lips.  Rain had been falling all the morning; it was cold; it drenched the body, and especially the bare head, of the venerable man.  A wretch saw that he was shivering, and cried out to him, "Thou tremblest, Bailly."—­“I am cold, my friend,” mildly answered the victim.  These were his last words.

Bailly descended into the moat, where the executioner burnt before him the red flag of the 17th July; he then with a firm step mounted the scaffold.  Let us have the courage to say it, when the head of our venerable colleague fell, the paid witnesses whom this horrid execution had assembled on the Champ de Mars burst into infamous acclamations.

I had announced a faithful recital of the martyrdom of Bailly; I have kept my word.  I said that I should banish many circumstances without reality, and that the drama would thus become less atrocious.  If I am to trust your aspect, I have not accomplished the second part of my promise.  The imagination perhaps cannot reach beyond the cruel facts on which I have been obliged to dilate.  You ask what I can have retrenched from former relations, whilst what remains is so deplorable.

The order for execution addressed by Fouquier Tinville to the executioner has been seen by several persons now living.  They all declare that if it differs from the numerous orders of a similar nature that the wretch sent off daily, it was only by the substitution of the following words:  “Esplanade du Champ de Mars,” for the usual designation of “Place de la Revolution.”  Now, the Revolutionary Tribunal has deserved many anathemas, but I never remarked its being reproached with not having known how to enforce obedience.

I felt myself relieved from an immense weight, Gentlemen, when I could dispel from my thoughts the image of a melancholy march on foot of two hours, because with it there disappeared two hours of corporeal ill-usage, which, according to those same accounts, our virtuous colleague must have endured from the Conciergerie to the Champ de Mars.