: "M. le Procureur-General has just had the woman
Acquet examined by four surgeons, three of whom had not seen her before.
They have certified that she is not pregnant, and so she is to be
executed to-day."

We know nothing of the way in which she prepared for death, nor of the
feeling which the news of her imminent execution must have occasioned in
the prison; but when she was handed over to the executioner for the
final arrangements, Mme. Acquet wrote two or three letters to beg that
her children might never fall into her husband's hands. Her toilet was
then made; her beautiful black hair, which she had cut off on coming to
the conciergerie two years previously, fell now under the executioner's
scissors; she put on a sort of jacket of white flannel, and her hands
were tied behind her back. She was now ready; it was half past four in
the afternoon, the doors opened, and a squad of gendarmes surrounded the
cart.

The cortege went by the "Gros-Horloge" to the "Vieux-Marche." Some one
who saw Mme. Acquet pass, seated in the cart beside the executioner
Ferey, says that "her white dress and short black hair blowing in her
face made the paleness of her skin conspicuous; she was neither downcast
nor bold; the sentence was cried aloud beside the cart."

She died calmly, as she had lived for months. At five o'clock she
appeared on the platform, very white and very tranquil; unresisting, she
let them tie her; without fear or cry she lay on the board which swung
and carried her under the knife. Her head fell without anything
happening to retard the execution, and the authorities congratulated
themselves on the fact in the report sent to Real that evening: "The
thing caused no greater sensation than that ordinarily produced by
similar events; the rather large crowd did not give the slightest
trouble."

And those who had stayed to watch the scaffold disappeared before the
gendarmes escorting the men who had come to take away the body. A few
followed it to the cemetery of Saint-Maur where the criminals were
usually buried. The basket was emptied into a ditch that had been dug
not far from a young tree to which some unknown hand had attached a
black ribbon, to mark the spot which neither cross nor tombstone might
adorn. The rain and wind soon destroyed this last sign; and nothing now
remains to show the corner of earth in the deserted and abandoned
cemetery in which still lies the body of the woman whose rank in other
times woul