Hotel Montbazon. The cart bearing the three bodies came
first, then the dragoons, then Morgan walking alone in a clear space of
some ten feet before and behind him, then the gendarmes. At the end of
the wall they turned to the left.

Suddenly, through an opening that existed at that time between the wall
and the market-place, Morgan saw the scaffold raising its two posts to
heaven like two bloody arms.

"Faugh!" he exclaimed, "I have never seen a guillotine, and I had no
idea it was so ugly."

Then, without further remark, he drew his dagger and plunged it into his
breast up to the hilt.

The captain of the gendarmerie saw the movement without being in time
to prevent it. He spurred his horse toward Morgan, who, to his own
amazement and that of every one else, remained standing. But Morgan,
drawing a pistol from his belt and cocking it, exclaimed: "Stop! It was
agreed that no one should touch me. I shall die alone, or three of us
will die together."

The captain reined back his horse.

"Forward!" said Morgan.

They reached the foot of the guillotine. Morgan drew out his dagger and
struck again as deeply as before. A cry of rage rather than pain escaped
him.

"My soul must be riveted to my body," he said.

Then, as the assistants wished to help him mount the scaffold on which
the executioner was awaiting him, he cried out: "No, I say again, let no
one touch me."

Then he mounted the three steps without staggering.

When he reached the platform, he drew out the dagger again and struck
himself a third time. Then a frightful laugh burst from his lips;
flinging the dagger, which he had wrenched from the third ineffectual
wound, at the feet of the executioner, he exclaimed: "By my faith! I
have done enough. It is your turn; do it if you can."

A minute later the head of the intrepid young man fell upon the
scaffold, and by a phenomenon of that unconquerable vitality which he
possessed it rebounded and rolled forward beyond the timbers of the
guillotine.

Go to Bourg, as I did, and they will tell you that, as the head rolled
forward, it was heard to utter the name of Amelie.

The dead bodies were guillotined after the living one; so that the
spectators, instead of losing anything by the events we have just
related, enjoyed a double spectacle.

CHAPTER LIV. THE CONFESSION

Three days after the events we have just recited, a carriage covered
with dust and drawn by two horses white with foam stopped ab