The sentence pronounced against the assassin was execrable—­a crime against the memory of the great man whom it professed to avenge.  It was decreed that the right hand of Gerard should be burned off with a red-hot iron, that his flesh should be torn from his bones with pincers in six different places, that he should be quartered and disembowelled alive, that his heart should be torn from his bosom and flung in his face, and that, finally, his head should be taken off.  Not even his horrible crime, with its endless consequences, nor the natural frenzy of indignation which it had excited, could justify this savage decree, to rebuke which the murdered hero might have almost risen from the sleep of death.  The sentence was literally executed on the 14th of July, the criminal supporting its horrors with the same astonishing fortitude.  So calm were his nerves, crippled and half roasted as he was ere he mounted the scaffold, that when one of the executioners was slightly injured in the ear by the flying from the handle of the hammer with which he was breaking the fatal pistol in pieces, as the first step in the execution—­a circumstance which produced a general laugh in the crowd—­a smile was observed upon Balthazar’s face in sympathy with the general hilarity.  His lips were seen to move up to the moment when his heart was thrown in his face—­“Then,” said a looker-on, “he gave up the ghost.”

The reward promised by Philip to the man who should murder Orange was paid to the heirs of Gerard.  Parma informed his sovereign that the “poor man” had been executed, but that his father and mother were still living; to whom he recommended the payment of that “merced” which “the laudable and generous deed had so well deserved.”  This was accordingly done, and the excellent parents, ennobled and enriched by the crime of their son, received instead of the twenty-five thousand crowns promised in the Ban, the three seignories of Lievremont, Hostal, and Dampmartin in the Franche Comte, and took their place at once among the landed aristocracy.  Thus the bounty of the Prince had furnished the weapon by which his life was destroyed, and his estates supplied the fund out of which the assassin’s family received the price of blood.  At a later day, when the unfortunate eldest son of Orange returned from Spain after twenty-seven years’ absence, a changeling and a Spaniard, the restoration of those very estates was offered to him by Philip the Second, provided he would continue to pay a fixed proportion of their rents to the family of his father’s murderer.  The education which Philip William had received, under the King’s auspices, had however, not entirely destroyed all his human feelings, and he rejected the proposal with scorn.  The estates remained with the Gerard family, and the patents of nobility which they had received were used to justify their exemption from certain taxes, until the union of Franche Comte, with France, when a French governor tore the documents in pieces and trampled them under foot.