miled faintly and darted such a deep penetrating glance
at Guillaume, that ever afterwards the latter felt its smart. But what
last thought, what supreme legacy had Salvat left him to meditate upon,
perhaps to put into execution? It was all so poignant that Pierre feared
some involuntary call on his brother's part; and so he laid his hand upon
his arm to quiet him.

"Long live Anarchy!"

It was Salvat who had raised this cry. But in the deep silence his husky,
altered voice seemed to break. The few who were near at hand had turned
very pale; the distant crowd seemed bereft of life. The horse of one of
the Gardes de Paris was alone heard snorting in the centre of the space
which had been kept clear.

Then came a loathsome scramble, a scene of nameless brutality and
ignominy. The headsman's helps rushed upon Salvat as he came up slowly
with brow erect. Two of them seized him by the head, but finding little
hair there, could only lower it by tugging at his neck. Next two others
grasped him by the legs and flung him violently upon a plank which tilted
over and rolled forward. Then, by dint of pushing and tugging, the head
was got into the "lunette," the upper part of which fell in such wise
that the neck was fixed as in a ship's port-hole--and all this was
accomplished amidst such confusion and with such savagery that one might
have thought that head some cumbrous thing which it was necessary to get
rid of with the greatest speed. But the knife fell with a dull, heavy,
forcible thud, and two long jets of blood spurted from the severed
arteries, while the dead man's feet moved convulsively. Nothing else
could be seen. The executioner rubbed his hands in a mechanical way, and
an assistant took the severed blood-streaming head from the little basket
into which it had fallen and placed it in the large basket into which the
body had already been turned.

Ah! that dull, that heavy thud of the knife! It seemed to Guillaume that
he had heard it echoing far away all over that district of want and toil,
even in the squalid rooms where thousands of workmen were at that moment
rising to perform their day's hard task! And there the echo of that thud
acquired formidable significance; it spoke of man's exasperation with
injustice, of zeal for martyrdom, and of the dolorous hope that the blood
then spilt might hasten the victory of the disinherited.

Pierre, for his part, at the sight of that loathsome butchery, the abject
cutthroat w