In the Luxembourg prison.
Juliette was alone at last--that is to say, comparatively alone, for
there were too many aristocrats, too many criminals and traitors, in the
prisons of Paris now, to allow of any seclusion of those who were about
to be tried, condemned, and guillotined.
The young girl had been marched through the crowded streets of Paris,
followed by a jeering mob, who readily recognised in the gentle,
high-bred girl the obvious prey, which the Committee of Public Safety
was wont, from time to time to throw to the hungry hydra-headed dog of
the Revolution.
Lately the squalid spectators of the noisome spectacle on the Place de
la Guillotine had had few of these very welcome sights: an aristocrat
--a real, elegant, refined woman, with white hands and proud, pale
face--mounting the steps of the same scaffold on which perished the
vilest criminals and most degraded brutes.
Madame Guillotine was, above all, catholic in her tastes, her gaunt
arms, painted blood red, were open alike to the murderer and the thief,
the aristocrats of ancient lineage, and the proletariat from the gutter.
But lately the executions had been almost exclusively of a political
character. The Girondins were fighting their last upon the bloody arena
of the Revolution. One by one they fell still fighting, still preaching
moderation, still foretelling disaster and appealing to that people,
whom they had roused from one slavery, in order to throw it headlong
under a tyrannical yoke more brutish, more absolute than before.
There were twelve prisons in Paris then, and forty thousand in France,
and they were all full. An entire army went round the country recruiting
prisoners. There was no room for separate cells, no room for privacy, no
cause or desire for the most elementary sense of delicacy.
Women, men, children--all were herded together, for one day, perhaps
two, and a night or so, and then death would obliterate the petty
annoyances, the womanly blushes caused by this sordid propinquity.
Death levelled all, erased everything.
When Marie Antoinette mounted the guillotine she had forgotten that for
six weeks she practically lived day and night in the immediate
companionship of a set of degraded soldiery.
Juliette, as she marched through the streets between two men of the
National Guard, and followed by Merlin, was hooted and jeered at,
insulted, pelted with mud. One woman tried to push past the soldiers,
and to strike her in the face--a woman! not thirty!--and who was
dragging a pale, squalid little boy by the hand.
"_Crache donc sur l'aristo, voyons!_" the woman said to this poor,
miserable little scrap of humanity as the soldiers pushed her roughly
aside. "Spit on the aristocrat!" And the child tortured its own small,
parched mouth so that, in obedience to its mother, it might defile and
bespatter a beautiful, innocent girl.
The soldiers laughed, and improved the occasion with another insulting
jest. Even Merlin forgot his vexation, delighted at the incident.
But Juliette had seen nothing of it all.
She was walking as in a dream. The mob did not exist for her; she heard
neither insult nor vituperation. She did not see the evil, dirty faces
pushed now and then quite close to her; she did not feel the rough hands
of the soldiers jostling her through the crowd: she had gone back to her
own world of romance, where she dwelt alone now with the man she loved.
Instead of the squalid houses of Paris, with their eternal device of
Fraternity and Equality, there were beautiful trees and shrubs of laurel
and of roses around her, making the air fragrant with their soft,
intoxicating perfumes; sweet voices from the land of dreams filled the
atmosphere with their tender murmur, whilst overhead a cloudless sky
illumined this earthly paradise.
She was happy--supremely, completely happy. She had saved him from the
consequences of her own iniquitous crime, and she was about to give her
life for him, so that his safety might be more completely assured.
Her love for him he would never know; now he knew only her crime, but
presently, when she would be convicted and condemned, confronted with a
few scraps of burned paper and a torn letter-case, then he would know
that she had stood her trial, self-accused, and meant to die for him.
Therefore the past few moments were now wholly hers. She had the rights
to dwell on those few happy seconds when she listened to the avowal of
his love. It was ethereal, and perhaps not altogether human, but it was
hers. She had been his divinity, his madonna; he had loved in her that,
which was her truer, her better self.
What was base in her was not truly her. That awful oath, sworn so
solemnly, had been her relentless tyrant; and her religion--a religion
of superstition and of false ideals--had blinded her, and dragged her
into crime.
She had arrogated to herself that which was God's alone--"Vengeance!"
which is not for man.
That through it all she should have known love, and learned its tender
secrets, was more than she deserved. That she should have felt his
burning kisses on her hand was heavenly compensation for all she would
have to suffer.
And so she allowed them to drag her through the sansculotte mob of
Paris, who would have torn her to pieces then and there, so as not to
delay the pleasure of seeing her die.
They took her to the Luxembourg, once the palace of the Medici, the home
of proud "Monsieur" in the days of the Great Monarch, now a loathsome,
overfilled prison.
It was then six o'clock in the afternoon, drawing towards the close of
this memorable day. She was handed over to the governor of the prison, a
short, thick-set man in black trousers and black-shag woollen shirt, and
wearing a dirty red cap, with tricolour rosette on the side of his
unkempt head.
He eyed her up and down as she passed under the narrow doorway, then
murmured one swift query to Merlin:
"Dangerous?"
"Yes," replied Merlin laconically.
"You understand," added the governor; "we are so crowded. We ought to
know if individual attention is required."
"Certainly," said Merlin, "you will be personally responsible for this
prisoner to the Committee of Public Safety."
"Any visitors allowed?"
"Certainly not, without the special permission of the Public
Prosecutor."
Juliette heard this brief exchange of words over her future fate.
No visitor would be allowed to see her. Well, perhaps that would be
best. She would have been afraid to meet Déroulède again, afraid to read
in his eyes that story of his dead love, which alone might have
destroyed her present happiness.
And she wished to see no one. She had a memory to dwell on--a short,
heavenly memory. It consisted of a few words, a kiss--the last one--on
her hand, and that passionate murmur which had escaped from his lips
when he knelt at her feet:
"Juliette!"