The crowd poured by like a flood. The abbe, yielding to an impulse of
curiosity, looked up above the heads, and there in the tumbril stood
the man who had heard mass in the garret three days ago.

"Who is it?" he asked; "who is the man with----"

"That is the headsman," answered M. Ragon, calling the executioner
--the _executeur des hautes oeuvres_--by the name he had borne under
the Monarchy.

"Oh! my dear, my dear! M. l'Abbe is dying!" cried out old Madame
Ragon. She caught up a flask of vinegar, and tried to restore the old
priest to consciousness.

"He must have given me the handkerchief that the King used to wipe his
brow on the way to his martyrdom," murmured he. " . . . Poor man!
. . . There was a heart in the steel blade, when none was found in all
France . . . "

The perfumers thought that the poor abbe was raving.



PARIS, January 183l.




ADDENDUM