The promise was kept. Upon the oaken table, stretching the length of their dungeon was set out a supper, royal in its magnificence. Every luxury to be obtained, every delicate wine with a name, filled those portions of the table not covered by a wealth of flowers and great clusters of brilliantly burning wax candles.
To one Abbé Lambert, who lived fifty years after that night, we owe all we have learnt concerning that final meal. This minister was waiting to offer consolation to the condemned as they passed to the scaffold.
The supper lasted from midnight until the dawn of day—at the end of October, about half-past five. It was the feast of their marriage with death. No sign was given of their approaching end. All ate with sobriety, but with appetite; and it was only when the fruit and wine alone remained on the table that the conversation became excited and powerful.
Many, especially the younger men, who did not leave families behind them, were very gay and witty. They had done no great wrong, and were sacrificed to duty, therefore they met death with cheerful faces.
With solemn break of day, the conversation became graver.
Brissot cried, “now that we, the honest men amongst those who govern, are about to die, what will become of the republic? How much blood will it require to wash away the memory of ours?”
“Friends,” cried Vergniaud, “we have killed the tree by over-pruning it. It was aged—Robespierre cuts it down. Will he be more fortunate than ourselves? No; the land of France is now too weak for honest growth. The people play with laws as children with toys; they are too weak to govern themselves; and they will return to their kings as children to their toys, after they are tired of having thrown them away. We thought ourselves at Rome; we were in Paris. But, in dying, let us leave to the whole of France—the strength of hope. Some day—some great day—she will be able to govern herself.”
At ten o’clock the executioners arrived to prepare the victims for the scaffold. Gensomé, picking up a lock of the black, brilliant hair cut from his head, gave it to Abbé Lambert, and begged him to carry it to his wife. “Tell her,” he said, “it is all I can send, and that I die thinking of her.”
Vergniaud drew his watch from his pocket, scratched his initials and the date in it with a pin, and sent it by the hands of one of the executioners’ assistants to a young girl whom he loved deeply, and whom it is said he intended to marry.
Every one sent a something to some one or more in memory of himself, and it is pleasant to be able to state that every message and remembrance were faithfully delivered.