"Flee, flee, flee!"
He tried to sign but could only trace four letters of his name.
"For her," he gasped, holding out his convulsed arm towards his companion.
He fell back without breath, movement or look—he was dead.
Gilbert turned to the spectators of this scene and said:
"Mirabeau is no more."
Taking the paper whose destination he alone might divine, he rapidly departed from the death chamber.
Some seconds after the doctor's going, a great clamor arose in the street and was prolonged throughout Paris.
The grief was intense and wide. The Assembly voted a public funeral, and the Pantheon, formerly Church of St. Genevieve, was selected for the great man's resting-place. Three years subsequently the Convention sent the coffin to the Clamart Cemetery to be bundled among the corpses of the publicly executed.
Petion claimed to have discovered a contra-revolutionary plot written in the hand of Mirabeau, and Congress reversed its previous judgment and declared that genius could not condone corruption.