e son of that base sycophant who rode courier to the
Capet to Varennes?' said the hard-featured man at the table.

"'Of the truest gentleman of France,' called out a loud voice from below
the platform; 'Vive le roi!' It was the blind man who spoke, and waved
his cap above his head.

"'To the guillotine! to the guillotine!' screamed a hundred voices, in
tones wilde than the cries of famished wolves, as, seizing the aged man,
they tore his clothes to very rags.

"In an instant all attention was turned from the platform to the scene
below it, where, with shouts and screams of fury, the terrible mob
yelled aloud for blood. In vain the guards endeavored to keep back the
people, who twice rescued their victim from the hands of the soldiery;
and already a confused murmur arose that the commissary himself was a
traitor to the public, and favored the tyrants, when a dull, clanking
sound rose above the tumult, and a cheer of triumph proclaimed the
approach of the instrument of torture.

"In their impetuous torrent of vengeance they had dragged the guillotine
from the distant end of the 'Place,' where it usually stood; and there
now still knelt the figure of a condemned man, lashed with his arms
behind him, on the platform, awaiting the moment of his doom. Oh, that
terrible face, whereon death had already set its seal! With glazed,
lack-lustre eye, and cheek leaden and quivering, he gazed around on the
fiendish countenances like one awakening from a dream, his lips parted
as though to speak; but no sound came forth.

"'Place! place for Monsieur le Marquis!' shouted a ruffian, as he
assisted to raise the figure of the blind man up the steps; and a ribald
yell of fiendish laughter followed the brutal jest.

"'Thou art to make thy journey in most noble company,' said another to
the culprit on the platform.

"'An he see not his way in the next world better than in this, thou must
lend him a hand, friend,' said a third. And with many a ruffian joke
they taunted their victims, who stood on the last threshold of life.

"Among the crowd upon the scaffold of the guillotine I could see the
figure of the blind man as it leaned and fell on either side, as the
movement of the mob bore it.

"'_Parbleu!_ these Royalists would rather kneel than stand," said a
voice, as they in vain essayed to make the old man place his feet under
him; and ere the laughter which this rude jest excited ceased, a cry
broke forth of--'He is dead! he is dead