THE EXECUTION
It has been said that our family were the martyrs of the Revolution. Our
parents suffered but they had previously known happiness. But I? What
earthly fruit of good had passed my lips? What wrong had I, an innocent
boy, committed? As I daily sat in darkness awaiting my bread and water,
what a world was revealed to me, Thérèse! Retributive justice demanding
an eye for an eye stood in my dungeon. I was called upon to balance the
accounts of my delinquent ancestry.
Man is a creature of habit. My senses daily grew more accustomed to the
pestilential cavern. I began to distinguish the objects in my dungeon.
Light seemed to gleam faintly through the joinings of the stones. My
pupils dilated like those of nocturnal birds. My hearing grew more acute
and recognized the jailer's footfall long before he reached my door. I
could dimly hear the call of the sentinels and the tramping of the
guard.
One night in spring I distinguished voices in the ditch outside my cell
and the dull sound of spades. Some one said, "Make it deeper and wider
that it may hold the body." A platoon of soldiers halted and struck the
breeches of their guns upon the ground. They were arranging an
execution!
Only the wall separated us as a voice which was harsh yet timid, almost
apologetic, pronounced a death sentence. The name of the condemned made
me start: Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon, Conte. Our family blood was
about to spatter those walls erected by our ancestors. A sweet sonorous
voice penetrated the stones. The Count was asking an officer to be the
bearer of a death memento.
"For the Princesse de Rohan," he said, placing in his hands a letter, a
ring and a lock of hair.
"Hang a lantern around his neck," was the brutal order that interrupted
the prisoner. "No aim can be taken in this darkness."
Then followed a cruel fateful moment; then the order; then the
rebounding of the balls from the outer wall of my dungeon; then the thud
of the falling body; then suppressed oaths and stern commands; then the
noise of spades. As the platoon of soldiers marched away, I said to
myself, "My cousin, the Duke d'Enghien has been keeping me company, and
now he lies very close."
No clothes had been given me during my imprisonment and I was in
tatters. I shivered, wrapped in my filthy blanket. My hair hung on my
shoulders in long matted curls; my face--beardless on entering the
tower--was half covered with a tangled crop, my nails so long that they
tore off in great shreds unless I gnawed them close with my teeth. I
could not calculate the duration of my captivity. I seemed losing the
power of thought. I lived over and over my cousin's execution until it
seemed to have been my own. I assured myself that I was awakening after
death and I felt the bullet wounds in my head. I refused nourishment,
saying feebly that dead men required no food. On the third day of my
self-imposed starvation the hinges of my door creaked at an unaccustomed
hour and my jailer was communicative for the first time.
"Get up and follow me," he said.
I remained motionless, for was I not a corpse? The man raised me roughly
and placed an arm around my shoulders. Then I comprehended that I lived
and concluded that execution was about to take place. A great peace
followed this conviction. When we reached daylight, the air asphyxiated
me like a powerful gas and when my guide opened a door, saying, "Here!"
I fell on the floor in a swoon.