settled back into its devilish sneer. "At least, gentle Neapolitan, the
guillotine will unite us. Oh, we shall sleep well our wedding-night!"
And, with a laugh, he strode away through the crowd, and vanished into
his lair.

....

She was placed in her gloomy cell, to await the morrow. But the child
was still spared her; and she thought it seemed as if conscious of the
awful present. In their way to the prison it had not moaned or wept. It
had looked with its clear eyes, unshrinking, on the gleaming pikes and
savage brows of the huissiers. And now, alone in the dungeon, it put its
arms round her neck, and murmured its indistinct sounds, low and sweet
as some unknown language of consolation and of heaven. And of heaven it
was!--for, at the murmur, the terror melted from her soul; upward, from
the dungeon and the death,--upward, where the happy cherubim chant the
mercy of the All-loving, whispered that cherub's voice. She fell upon
her knees and prayed. The despoilers of all that beautifies and hallows
life had desecrated the altar, and denied the God!--they had removed
from the last hour of their victims the Priest, the Scripture, and the
Cross! But Faith builds in the dungeon and the lazar-house its sublimest
shrines; and up, through roofs of stone, that shut out the eye of
Heaven, ascends the ladder where the angels glide to and fro,--PRAYER.

And there, in the very cell beside her own, the atheist Nicot sits
stolid amidst the darkness, and hugs the thought of Danton, that death
is nothingness. ("Ma demeure sera bientot LE NEANT" (My abode will soon
be nothingness), said Danton before his judges.)) His, no spectacle
of an appalled and perturbed conscience! Remorse is the echo of a lost
virtue, and virtue he never knew. Had he to live again, he would live
the same. But more terrible than the death-bed of a believing and
despairing sinner that blank gloom of apathy,--that contemplation of
the worm and the rat of the charnel-house; that grim and loathsome
NOTHINGNESS which, for his eye, falls like a pall over the universe of
life. Still, staring into space, gnawing his livid lip, he looks upon
the darkness, convinced that darkness is forever and forever!

....

Place, there! place! Room yet in your crowded cells. Another has come to
the slaughter-house.

As the jailer, lamp in hand, ushered in the stranger, the latter touched
him and whispered. The stranger drew a jewel from his finger. Diantre,
how the diamond fl