ts; their flickering gleams showed
soldiers, armed and mounted, dashing along, regardless of the crowd, to
assemble in the Place de St. Pierre; tiles were sometimes thrown at them
on their way, but, missing the distant culprit, fell upon some
unoffending neighbor. The confusion was bewildering, and became still
more so, when, hurrying through all the streets toward the Place de St.
Pierre, the people found it barricaded on all sides, and filled with
mounted guards and archers. Carts, fastened to the posts at each corner,
closed each entrance, and sentinels, armed with arquebuses, were
stationed close to the carts. In the centre of the Place rose a pile
composed of enormous beams placed crosswise upon one another, so as to
form a perfect square; these were covered with a whiter and lighter wood;
an enormous stake arose from the centre of the scaffold. A man clothed in
red and holding a lowered torch stood near this sort of mast, which was
visible from a long distance. A huge chafing-dish, covered on account of
the rain, was at his feet.

At this spectacle, terror inspired everywhere a profound silence; for an
instant nothing was heard but the sound of the rain, which fell in
floods, and of the thunder, which came nearer and nearer.

Meanwhile, Cinq-Mars, accompanied by MM. du Lude and Fournier and all the
more important personages of the town, had sought refuge from the storm
under the peristyle of the church of Ste.-Croix, raised upon twenty stone
steps. The pile was in front, and from this height they could see the
whole of the square. The centre was entirely clear, large streams of
water alone traversed it; but all the windows of the houses were
gradually lighted up, and showed the heads of the men and women who
thronged them.

The young D'Effiat sorrowfully contemplated this menacing preparation.
Brought up in sentiments of honor, and far removed from the black
thoughts which hatred and ambition arouse in the heart of man, he could
not conceive that such wrong could be done without some powerful and
secret motive. The audacity of such a condemnation seemed to him so
enormous that its very cruelty began to justify it in his eyes; a secret
horror crept into his soul, the same that silenced the people. He almost
forgot the interest with which the unhappy Urbain had inspired him, in
thinking whether it were not possible that some secret correspondence
with the infernal powers had justly provoked such excessive severity