he joined Napoleon, thinking of the little vexations the Royalists loved
to inflict on the men who had conquered the Continent. "You will no
longer weep when you leave the Tuileries." The unfortunate lady wept now
as she vainly sought some mercy for her husband. Arrested on the 5th of
August, sentenced on the 6th of December, Ney was shot on the 7th of
December, and the very manner of his execution shows that, in taking his
life there was much more of revenge than of justice.

If Ney were to be shot, it is obvious that it should have been as a high
act of justice. If neither the rank nor the services of the criminal
were to save him, his death could not be too formal, too solemn, too
public. Even an ordinary military execution is always carried out with
grave and striking forms: there is a grand parade of the troops, that all
may see with their own eyes the last act of the law. After the execution
the troops defile past the body, that all may see the criminal actually
dead: There was nothing of all this in the execution of Ney. A few
chance passers, in the early morning of the 7th of December 1815, saw a
small body of troops waiting by the wall of the garden of the Luxemburg.
A fiacre drove up, out of which got Marshal Ney in plain clothes, himself
surprised by the everyday aspect of the place. Then, when the officer of
the firing party (for such the spectators now knew it to be) saw whom it
was he was to fire on, he became, it is said, perfectly petrified; and a
peer, one of the judges of Ney, the Duke de la Force, took his place.
Ney fell at the first volley with six balls in his breast, three in the
head and neck, and one in the arm, and in a quarter of an hour the body
was removed; "plain Michel Ney" as he had said to the secretary
enunciating his title in reading his sentence, "plain Michel Ney, soon to
be a little dust."

The Communists caught red-handed in the streets of Paris in 1870 died