The cart reached the scaffold at four-thirty in the afternoon. Marie was the first to mount the steps to the guillotine.
Says De Goncourt, her biographer:
"They heard her on the steps of the scaffold, lost and desperate, mad with anguish and terror, struggling, imploring, begging for mercy, crying, 'Help! Help!' like a woman being assassinated by robbers."
Then fell the ax edge. And Marie's seven-million-dollar debt to the people of France was paid.
CHAPTER TEN
"THE MOST GORGEOUS LADY BLESSINGTON"
She was the ugly duckling of a family of seven beautiful children—the children of queer old "Shiver-the-Frills" Power, of Tipperary. Her name was Marguerite. Her father picked out a pretty name for the homely girl and then considered his duty done.
Marguerite was a great trial to everybody; to her good-looking brothers and lovely sisters; to Shiver-the-Frills, who was bitterly chagrined that his record for beauteous offspring should have been marred by so hideous an exception; to the family governess, who wouldn't even take the trouble to teach her to read; to the neighbors, whose joy in beauty she offended. Altogether, Marguerite was taught to consider herself a mistake. It is a lesson that children learn with pitiful readiness. Perhaps the mystic "Unpardonable Sin" consists in teaching them such a damnable doctrine.
Her father's baptismal name was not really Shiver-the-Frills, though nobody ever spoke of him by any other term. He had been christened Edmund, and he was a squireen of the Tipperary village of Knockbrit. He was a local magistrate, and he fulfilled his magisterial office almost as well as a mad dog might have done.