ed at the
corner of the little Rue Saint-Antoine something frightful, a soft and
bloody mass upon which one of the participants in the massacres was
trampling with his iron-pegged shoes. It was a heap of corpses,
stripped, quite white, quite naked, which they had piled up there. It
was upon this pile that she was required to lay her hand and take the
oath;--this trial was too much. She turned around and uttered a cry:
'_Fi! l'horreur!_'"

"Release madame," said the president of the improvised tribunal. This
was the signal for her execution. A little peruke-maker, Charlat, a
drummer of the volunteers, struck off her cap with a blow of his pike,
but in doing so he wounded her in the forehead; the sight of the flowing
blood produced its usual effect upon the mob; they precipitated
themselves upon her, "her breasts were cut off with a knife, she was
stripped quite naked, Charlat opened her chest and took out her heart,
then he mutilated her in the most secret part of her body." A certain
Sieur Grison cut off her head; then the two wretches, taking on the ends
of their pikes, one her head and the other her heart, set off down the
Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the Temple, followed by an immense
crowd, "dumb with astonishment." They carried the head into the shop of
a coiffeur, who washed, combed, and powdered the blond hair. "Now," he
said, "Antoinette will be able to recognize her." Then the procession
proceeded in the direction of the Temple again; but by this time it
began to be feared that, carried away by their excitement, the
cut-throats might inflict the same fate upon the royal family confined
there, and the Commune sent hastily some commissioners, girded with
large tricolored sashes. When Grison and Charlat arrived, they demanded
permission to promenade under the windows of the apartments occupied by
the king and queen, which was immediately granted them, and the king was
even requested to go to the window at the moment when the livid head of
the princess was elevated in front of him. "The march was continued
throughout Paris, without any one interposing any obstacle. The head was
carried to the Palais-Royal, and the Duc d'Orleans, who was then at
table, was obliged to rise, to go to the balcony, and to salute the
assassins."

The only relief to be found in the perusal of these chronicles is in
some incident in which the executioners turn on each other. Among the
most vociferous of the "citizenesses" was th