We know nothing of the way in which she prepared for death, nor of the feeling which the news of her imminent execution must have occasioned in the prison; but when she was handed over to the executioner for the final arrangements, Mme. Acquet wrote two or three letters to beg that her children might never fall into her husband’s hands.  Her toilet was then made; her beautiful black hair, which she had cut off on coming to the conciergerie two years previously, fell now under the executioner’s scissors; she put on a sort of jacket of white flannel, and her hands were tied behind her back.  She was now ready; it was half past four in the afternoon, the doors opened, and a squad of gendarmes surrounded the cart.

The cortege went by the “Gros-Horloge” to the “Vieux-Marche.”  Some one who saw Mme. Acquet pass, seated in the cart beside the executioner Ferey, says that “her white dress and short black hair blowing in her face made the paleness of her skin conspicuous; she was neither downcast nor bold; the sentence was cried aloud beside the cart.”

She died calmly, as she had lived for months.  At five o’clock she appeared on the platform, very white and very tranquil; unresisting, she let them tie her; without fear or cry she lay on the board which swung and carried her under the knife.  Her head fell without anything happening to retard the execution, and the authorities congratulated themselves on the fact in the report sent to Real that evening:  “The thing caused no greater sensation than that ordinarily produced by similar events; the rather large crowd did not give the slightest trouble.”

And those who had stayed to watch the scaffold disappeared before the gendarmes escorting the men who had come to take away the body.  A few followed it to the cemetery of Saint-Maur where the criminals were usually buried.  The basket was emptied into a ditch that had been dug not far from a young tree to which some unknown hand had attached a black ribbon, to mark the spot which neither cross nor tombstone might adorn.  The rain and wind soon destroyed this last sign; and nothing now remains to show the corner of earth in the deserted and abandoned cemetery in which still lies the body of the woman whose rank in other times would have merited the traditional epitaph:  “A very high, noble and powerful lady.”

CHAPTER X

THE CHOUANS SET FREE

A letter in a woman’s handwriting, addressed to Timoleon de Combray, Hotel de la Loi, Rue de Richelieu, its black seal hastily broken, contains these words:  “Alas, my dear cousin, you still continued to hope when all hope was over....  I cannot leave your mother and I am anxious about M. de Bonnoeil’s condition.”