The fourth and last procession, that of the 3d of May, was the most important of all.  It was to close by an expiatory ceremony in honor of Louis XVI., by the laying and benediction of the corner-stone of the monument voted by the Chamber of 1815, and which still awaited its foundation.  It is at the very place where the unfortunate sovereign had been executed that the monument was to be constructed.  The cortege left Notre-Dame and directed its course first to the Church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.  The Chamber of Peers, the Chamber of Deputies, all the functionaries, all the authorities of the Department of the Seine, followed the King and Dauphin, who advanced, accompanied by the ministers, the marshals, the officers of their houses, cordons bleus, cordons rouges.  Never since the end of the old regime had such a multitude of priests been seen defiling through the streets of Paris.  The pupils of all the seminaries, the almoners of all the colleges, the priests of all the parishes and all the chapels, stretched out in an endless double line, at the end of which appeared the Nuncio of the Pope, Cardinals de Latil, de Croi, and de La Fare, the Archbishop of Paris, and a crowd of prelates.  After the station of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, there was a second at Saint-Roch, then a third and last at the Assumption.  When the special prayers of the close of the jubilee had been said at this last parish, the immense cortege resumed its march to the place where Louis XVI. had brought his head to the sacrilegious scaffold.  The day chosen for the expiatory solemnity was the 3d of May, the anniversary of the return of Louis XVIII. to Paris in 1814, and then a political idea was connected with the religious ceremony.  A vast pavilion surmounted by a cross hung with draperies in violet velvet, and enclosing an altar, which was reached on four sides by four stairways of ten steps each, occupied the very place where, the 10th of January, 1793, the scaffold of the Martyr-King had been erected, in the middle of the Place called successively the Place Louis XV. and the Place de La Concorde, and which was thenceforth to be called the Place Louis XVI.

The account in the Moniteur says:—­

“A first salvo of artillery announced the arrival of the procession.  It presented as imposing a tableau as could be contemplated.  This old French nation—­the heir of its sixty kings at the head—­marched, preceded by the gifts made by Charlemagne to the Church of Paris, and the religious trophies that Saint Louis brought from the holy places.  The priests ascend to the altar.  Three times in succession they raise to heaven the cry for pardon and pity.  All the spectators fall upon their knees.  A profound, absolute silence reigns about the altar and over all the Place; a common sorrow overwhelms the people; the King’s eyes are filled with tears.”

In this multitude the absence of the Dauphiness, the daughter of Louis XVI., is remarked.  The Orphan of the Temple had made it a law for herself never to cross the place where her father had perished.  She went to the expiatory chapel of the Rue d’Anjou-Saint-Honore, to pass in prayer the time of the ceremony.