what they venture to call the head of this horrible
construction was turned towards the Garde-Meuble. A
basket of cylindrical shape, covered with leather, was
placed at the spot where the head of the King was to fall,
to receive it; and at one of the angles of the entablature,
to the right of the ladder, could be discerned a long wicker
basket prepared for the body, and on which one of the
executioners, while waiting for the King, had laid his hat.

Imagine, now, in the middle of the Place, these two
lugubrious things, a few paces from each other: the
pedestal of Louis XV. and the scaffold of Louis XVI.; that is
to say, the ruins of royalty dead and the martyrdom of
royalty living; around these two things four formidable
lines of armed men, preserving a great empty square in
the midst of an immense crowd; to the left of the scaffold,
the Champs-Elysees, to the right the Tuileries, which,
neglected and left at the mercy of the public had become
an unsightly waste of dirt heaps and trenches; and
over these melancholy edifices, over these black, leafless
trees, over this gloomy multitude, the bleak, sombre sky
of a winter morning, and one will have an idea of the
aspect which the Place de la Revolution presented at the
moment when Louis XVI., in the carriage of the Mayor
of Paris, dressed in white, the Book of Psalms clasped in
his hands, arrived there to die at a few minutes after ten
o'clock on January 21, 1793.

Strange excess of abasement and misery: the son of so
many kings, bound and sacred like the kings of Egypt,