gave the word to
go forward, and in a moment we were marching through the passages, up
frosty steps, in the stone corridors, and on out of the citadel into the
yard.

I remember that as we passed into the open air I heard the voice of a
soldier singing a gay air of love and war. Presently he came in sight.
He saw me, stood still for a moment looking curiously, and then, taking
up the song again at the very line where he had broken off, passed round
an angle of the building and was gone. To him I was no more than a moth
fluttering in the candle, to drop dead a moment later.

It was just on the verge of sunrise. There was the grayish-blue light in
the west, the top of a long range of forest was sharply outlined against
it, and a timorous darkness was hurrying out of the zenith. In the east
a sad golden radiance was stealing up and driving back the mystery of
the night, and that weird loneliness of an arctic world. The city was
hardly waking as yet, but straight silver columns of smoke rolled up out
of many chimneys, and the golden cross on the cathedral caught the
first rays of the sun. I was not interested in the city; I had now, as
I thought, done with men. Besides the four soldiers who had brought me
out, another squad surrounded me, commanded by a young officer whom I
recognized as Captain Lancy, the rough roysterer who had insulted me at
Bigot's palace over a year ago. I looked with a spirit absorbed upon the
world about me, and a hundred thoughts which had to do with man's life
passed through my mind. But the young officer, speaking sharply to me,
ordered me on, and changed the current of my thoughts. The coarseness
of the man and his insulting words were hard to bear, so that I was
constrained to ask him if it were not customary to protect a condemned
man from insult rather than to expose him to it. I said that I should
be glad of my last moments in peace. At that he asked Gabord why I was
unbound, and my jailer answered that binding was for criminals who were
to be HANGED!

I could scarcely believe my ears. I was to be shot, not hanged. I had
a thrill of gratitude which I can not describe. It may seem a nice
distinction, but to me there were whole seas between the two modes of
death. I need not blush in advance for being shot--my friends could bear
that without humiliation; but hanging would have always tainted their
memory of me, try as they would against it.

"The gallows is ready, and my orders were to see