beauty dependent upon small accessories. There was a dignity
even in his painful gait; the coarse prison-shirt, scissored low in the
neck, exhibited the straight columnar throat and swelling chest; for the
rest, he wore only a pair of black pantaloons and his own shapely boots.
As he emerged from the wicket, the chill morning air, laden with the dew
of the truck gardens near at hand, blew across the open spaces of the
suburbs, and smote him with a cold chill. He was plainly seen to
tremble; but in an instant, as if by the mere force of his will, he
stood motionless, and cast a first and only glance at the guillotine
straight before him. It was the glance of a man who meets an enemy's
eye, not shrinkingly, but half-defiant, as if even the bitter
retribution could not abash his strong courage. The dramatic manner
which is characteristic of the most real and earnest incidents of French
life had its fascination for la Pommerais, even at his death-hour. Not
Mr. Booth nor Mr. Forrest could have expressed the rallying, startling,
almost thrilling recognition of an instrument of death, better than this
actual criminal, whose last winkful of daylight was blackened by the
guillotine. It reminded one of Damon, in the pitch of the tragedy:--

"I stand upon the scaffold--I am standing on my throne."

His dark eye was scintillant; his nostril grew full; his shoulders fell
back as if to exhibit his broad, compact figure in manlier outline; he
seemed to feel that forty thousand men and women, and young children
were looking upon him to see how he dared to die, and that for a
generation his bearing should go into fireside descriptions. Then he
moved on between the files of soldiers at his shuffling pace, and before
him went the _aumonier_ or chaplain, swaying the crucifix, behind him
the executioner of Versailles--a rough and bearded man--to assist in the
final horror.

It was at this intense moment a most wonderful spectacle. As the
prisoner had first appeared, a single great shout had shaken the
multitude. It was the French word "_Voila!_" which means "Behold!"
"See!" Then every spectator stood on tiptoe; the silence of death
succeeded; all the close street was undulant with human motion; a few
house roofs near by were dizzy with folks who gazed down from the tiles;
all the way up the heights of Pere la Chaise, among the pale chapels and
monuments of the dead, the thousands of stirred beings swung and shook
like so many drowned