The queen’s face is white; all blood has left her cheeks and lips, but her eyes are red; they have wept so much, unfortunate queen!  She weeps not now.  Not one tear dims her eye, which pensively and calmly soars above the crowd, then is lifted up to the very roofs of the houses, then again is slowly lowered, and seems to stare over the human heads away into infinite distance.

Calm and pensive as the eye is the queen’s countenance, her lips are nearly closed, no nervous movement on her face tells whether she suffers, whether she feels, whether she notices those tens of thousands of eyes which are fixed on her, cold, curious, sarcastic!  And yet Marie Antoinette sees every thing!  She sees yonder woman who lifts up her child; she sees how this child with his tiny hands sends a kiss to the queen!  Suddenly a nervous agitation passes over the queen’s features, her lips tremble, and her eyes are obscured with a tear!  This first, this single token of human sympathy has revived the heart of the queen and awakened her from her torpor.

But the people are bent upon this, that Marie Antoinette shall not reach the end of her journey with this last comfort of pity.  They press on, howling and shouting, scorning and jubilant, nearer and nearer to the wagon; they sing sarcastic songs on Madame Veto, they clap hands, and point at her with the finger of scorn.

She, however, is calm; her look, cold and indifferent, runs over the crowd; only once it flames up with a last angry flash as she passes by the Palais Royal, where Philippe Egalite, the ex-Duke d’Orleans, resides, as she reads the inscription which he had placed at the gate of his palace.

At noon the chariot reaches at last its destination.  It stops at the foot of the scaffold, and Marie Antoinette alights from the wagon, and then calm and erect ascends the steps of the scaffold.

Her lips have not opened once on this awful journey; they now have no word of complaint, of farewell!  The only farewell which she has yet to say on earth is told by her look—­by a look which is slowly directed yonder to the Tuileries—­it is the farewell to past memories—­it deepens the pallor on the cheeks, it opens her lips to a painful sigh.  She then bows her head—­a momentary, breathless silence follows.  Samson lifts up the white head, which once had been the head of the Queen of France, and the people cry and shout, “Long live the republic!”

CHAPTER XIII.

The arrest.

Uninterruptedly had the guillotine for the last three months of the year 1793 continued its destructive work of murder, and the noblest and worthiest heads had fallen under this reaper of Death.  No personal merit, no nobility of character, no age, no youth, could hope to escape the death-instrument of the revolution when a noble name stood up as accuser.  Before this accuser every service was considered as nothing; it was enough to be an aristocrat, a ci-devant, to be suspected, to be dragged as a criminal before the tribunal of the revolution, and to be condemned.