She did not, like her husband, speed to Heaven. It was rather that she fled from earth.
The executioner was trembling more than his victim, so that she suffered a long agony of a few moments after she was upon the plank.
The assistant executioner took his brother’s place.
The head fell. It was taken up and carried around the scaffold.
“Long live the Republic!” saluted this brave display.
The Revolution thought itself avenged—it was befouled.
She came a foreigner—and they killed her.
Thus she died. Frivolous in prosperity, she died with intrepidity. Her misfortune was her mistrust of the people in her early days—her catastrophe, that all the sin and wickedness of the Court was laid to her account.
Called upon to fill a throne, those who called her gave her not even a tomb—for you may read in a parish register, “For the coffin of the Widow Capet, six shillings!”