hey would tear her to pieces. She was assured
that, as he expressed it, they would do her no harm. And indeed the
Jacobins themselves would have protected her from the populace, so anxious
were they to heap on her every indignity that would render death more
terrible. Louis had been allowed to quit the Temple in his carriage. Marie
Antoinette was to be drawn from the prison to the scaffold in a common
cart, seated on a bare plank; the executioner by her side, holding the
cords with which her hands were already bound. With a refinement of
barbarity, those who conducted the procession made it halt more than once,
that the people might gaze upon her, pointing her out to the mob with
words and gestures of the vilest insult. She heard them not; her thoughts
were with God: her lips were uttering nothing but prayers. Once for a
moment, as she passed in sight of the Tuileries, she was observed to cast
an agonized look toward its towers, remembering, perhaps, how reluctantly
she had quit it fourteen months before. It was midday before the cart
reached the scaffold. As she descended, she trod on the executioner's
foot. It might seem to have been ordained that her very last words might
be words of courtesy. "Excuse me, sir," she said, "I did not do it on
purpose;" and she added, "make haste." In a few moments all was over.

Her body was thrown into a pit in the common cemetery, and covered with
quicklime to insure its entire destruction. When, more than twenty years
afterward, her brother-in-law was restored to the throne, and with pious
affection desired to remove her remains and those of her husband to the
time-honored resting-place of their royal ancestors at St. Denis, no
remains of her who had once been the admiration of all beholders could be
found beyond some fragments of clothing, and one or two bones, among which
the faithful memory of Chateaubriand believed that he recognized the mouth
whose sweet smile had been impressed on his memory since the day on which
it acknowledged his loyalty on his first presentation, while still a boy,
at Versailles.

Thus miserably perished, by a death fit only for the vilest of criminals,
Marie Antoinette, the daughter of one sovereign, the wife of another, who
had never wronged or injured one human being. No one was ever more richly
endowed with all the charms which render woman attractive, or with all the
virtues that make her admirable. Even in her earliest years, her careless
and occasi