was charged with _incivisme_, and that, defying the court and
disdaining the charge, he was pronounced guilty--the whole circle,
standing up as the sentence was pronounced, and with a solemn waving
of their arms and murmur of their voices, assenting to the act of the
judge. The victim was then seized on, swept away into the darkness,
and after a brief pause I heard a shriek and a crash; the sentence had
been fulfilled--all was over. The court now covered their heads with
their mantles, as if in sorrow for this formidable necessity.

But how shall I speak of the closing scene? However it surprised and
absorbed me in that moment of nervous excitement, I can allude to it
now only as characteristic of a time when every mind in France was
half lunatic. I saw a figure enveloped in star-coloured light emerge
from the darkness, slowly ascend, in a vesture floating round it like
the robes which Raphael or Guido gives to the beings of another
sphere, and, accompanied by a burst of harmony as it rose, ascend to
the roof, where it suddenly disappeared. All was instantly the silence
and the darkness of the grave.

Daylight brought back my senses, and I was convinced that the
pantomimic spirit of the people, however unaccountably it might
disregard proprieties, had been busy with the scene. I should now
certainly have abandoned the supernatural portion of the conjecture
altogether; but on mentioning it to Cassini, he let me into the
solution at once.

"Have you never observed," said he, "the passion of all people for
walking on the edge of a precipice, climbing a church tower, looking
down from a battlement, or doing any one thing which gives them the
nearest possible chance of breaking their necks?--then you can