ern St. Just; the palsied Couthon crawls,
grovelling, beneath table; a shot,--an explosion! Robespierre would
destroy himself! The trembling hand has mangled, and failed to kill! The
clock of the Hotel de Ville strikes the third hour. Through the battered
door, along the gloomy passages, into the Death-hall, burst the crowd.
Mangled, livid, blood-stained, speechless but not unconscious, sits
haughty yet, in his seat erect, the Master-Murderer! Around him they
throng; they hoot,--they execrate, their faces gleaming in the tossing
torches! HE, and not the starry Magian, the REAL Sorcerer! And round HIS
last hours gather the Fiends he raised!

They drag him forth! Open thy gates, inexorable prison! The Conciergerie
receives its prey! Never a word again on earth spoke Maximilien
Robespierre! Pour forth thy thousands, and tens of thousands,
emancipated Paris! To the Place de la Revolution rolls the tumbril of
the King of Terror,--St. Just, Dumas, Couthon, his companions to the
grave! A woman--a childless woman, with hoary hair--springs to his
side, "Thy death makes me drunk with joy!" He opened his bloodshot
eyes,--"Descend to hell with the curses of wives and mothers!"

The headsmen wrench the rag from the shattered jaw; a shriek, and the
crowd laugh, and the axe descends amidst the shout of the countless
thousands, and blackness rushes on thy soul, Maximilien Robespierre! So
ended the Reign of Terror.

....

Daylight in the prison. From cell to cell they hurry with the
news,--crowd upon crowd; the joyous captives mingled with the very
jailers, who, for fear, would fain seem joyous too; they stream through
the dens and alleys of the grim house they will shortly leave. They
burst into a cell, forgotten since the previous morning. They found
there a young female, sitting upon her wretched bed; her arms crossed
upon her bosom, her face raised upward; the eyes unclosed, and a smile
of more than serenity--of bliss--upon her lips. Even in the riot of
their joy, they drew back in astonishment and awe. Never had they seen
life so beautiful; and as they crept nearer, and with noiseless feet,
they saw that the lips breathed not, that the repose was of marble,
that the beauty and the ecstasy were of death. They gathered round in
silence; and lo! at her feet there was a young infant, who, wakened
by their tread, looked at them steadfastly, and with its rosy fingers
played with its dead mother's robe. An orphan there in a dungeon va