eyes the last act of the law. After the execution
the troops defile past the body, that all may see the criminal actually
dead: There was nothing of all this in the execution of Ney. A few
chance passers, in the early morning of the 7th of December 1815, saw a
small body of troops waiting by the wall of the garden of the Luxemburg.
A fiacre drove up, out of which got Marshal Ney in plain clothes, himself
surprised by the everyday aspect of the place. Then, when the officer of
the firing party (for such the spectators now knew it to be) saw whom it
was he was to fire on, he became, it is said, perfectly petrified; and a
peer, one of the judges of Ney, the Duke de la Force, took his place.
Ney fell at the first volley with six balls in his breast, three in the
head and neck, and one in the arm, and in a quarter of an hour the body
was removed; "plain Michel Ney" as he had said to the secretary
enunciating his title in reading his sentence, "plain Michel Ney, soon to
be a little dust."

The Communists caught red-handed in the streets of Paris in 1870 died
with hardly less formality than was observed at the death-scene of the
Prince of the Moskowa and Duke of Elchingen, and the truth then became
plain. The Bourbons could not, dared not, attempt to carry out the
sentence of the law with the forms of the law. The Government did not
venture to let the troops or the people face the Marshal. The forms of
the law could not be carried out, the demands of revenge could be. And
if this be thought any exaggeration, the proof of the ill effects of this
murder, for its form makes it difficult to call it anything else, is
ready to our hands. It was impossible to get the public to believe that
Ney had really been killed in this manner, and nearly to this day we have
had fresh stories recurring of the real Ney being discovered in America.
The deed, however, had really been done. The Marshals now knew that when
the Princes fled they themselves must remain to die for the Royal cause;
and Louis had at last succeeded in preventing his return to his kingdom
amongst the baggage waggons of the Allies from being considered as a mere
subject for jeers. One detail of the execution of Ney, however, we are
told nothing of: we do not know if his widow, like Madame Labedoyere, had
to pay three francs a head to the soldiers of the firing party which shot
her husband. Whatever were the faults of the Bourbons, they at least
carried out their executions e