g been made
public, immense crowds collected in the Place de Greve in order to
witness the execution; scaffoldings were erected on every side for the
accommodation of the spectators; and the tumult at length became so
great that it reached the ears of the Marechal in his prison-chamber.
Rushing to the window, whence he could command a view of some portion of
the open fields leading to the Rue St. Antoine, along which numerous
groups were still making their eager way, he exclaimed, in violent
emotion: "I have been judged, and I am a dead man." One of his guards
hastened to assure him that the outcry was occasioned by a quarrel
between two nobles, which was about to terminate in a duel; and the
unhappy prisoner thus remained for a short time in uncertainty as to his
ultimate fate. Yet still, as he sat in his dreary prison, he heard the
continued murmur of the excited citizens, who, believing that he was to
be put to death by torchlight, persisted in holding their weary watch
until an hour before midnight.[199]

The King had, however, determined to postpone the execution until the
morrow; when, apparently yielding to the solicitations of the Duke's
family, but, as many surmised, anxious to avoid a tumult which the great
popularity of Biron with the troops, and the numerous friends and
followers whom he possessed about the Court, led him to apprehend might
prove the result of so public a disgrace to his surviving relatives,
Henry consented to change the place of execution to the court of the
Bastille, where the Marechal accordingly was beheaded at five o'clock in
the evening. The circumstances attending his decapitation are too
painful for detail; suffice it that his last struggles for life
displayed a cowardice which ill accorded with his previous gallantry,
and that it was only by a feint that the executioner at length succeeded
in performing his ghastly office; while so great had been the violence
of the victim, that his head bounded three times upon the scaffold, and
emitted more blood than the trunk from which it had been severed.

It was said that the father of the culprit, the former Marechal, had on
one occasion, during an exhibition of the violence in which Biron so
continually indulged, bitterly exclaimed: "I would advise you, Baron,
as soon as peace is signed, to go and plant cabbages on your estate, or
you will one day bring your head to the scaffold." [200] A fearful
prophecy fearfully fulfilled.

The corpse