"Between the Queen's cell and the Girondins' Chapel."
Between his victims! He is between his victims! The fearful warning on the prison walls passes again before his eyes: "Robespierre, your hour will come!..." The dead were right! If he had done away with the guillotine in time, he would perhaps not be there, himself a victim of the Terror he had let loose! But he could not! No, he could not, it was too soon.... He would have been engulfed in the turmoil, just the same! ... In continuing the Revolutionary Tribunal, in keeping the executioner at his post, he was merely protecting his own head!
His mind is flooded with ideas.... He is, dreaming vaguely, his dim eyes fixed on the low ceiling of his cell.... His youth smiles at him through the mist of years, every detail of the past comes back to him in clear and lucid vision.
He sees Clarisse seated at her harpsichord, he is turning over the leaves of her music ... but the vision trembles, and then fades away. Fever gradually rises to his brain, takes entire possession of him, and deadens his senses, so that he is completely unconscious, and when Fouquier-Tinville, his creature of the Revolutionary Tribunal, his accomplice in the days of bloodshed, comes forward to identify him, he does not recognise his voice.
The end is now approaching. At five in the afternoon the gendarmes come to conduct Robespierre to the scaffold. The Convention has decreed that for this occasion the guillotine shall be erected at the Place de la Révolution. Robespierre is borne on the litter through the crowd of prisoners, the victims of his hatred and his laws, and when the dying man has passed the threshold they breathe again. With him death departs and new life comes in.
The tumbril is waiting in the courtyard, surrounded by a crowd of sans-culottes and Mænads, and hundreds of spectators eager to witness the startling spectacle, are swarming in the streets to hoot and abuse Robespierre as heartily as they had cheered and applauded him at the Fête of the Supreme Being! To effect this startling change one sitting of the Convention has sufficed!
Robespierre is now in sight. This is the signal for the wildest uproar. He is seated on a bench in the first tumbril, and fastened against the bars of the cart to keep him from falling. The fresh air has revived him; he allows them to do as they please, looking on in silent scorn. Others of the condemned are placed in the same tumbril: Augustin Robespierre, Saint-Just, Dumas the president, Hauriot, and Couthon. The two last are seated right and left of Robespierre. Four other carts follow, equally loaded. The condemned number twenty-two in all.
Now Robespierre's via dolorosa begins.
Abuse and insults rain down on them in torrents, covering Robespierre and his accomplices with ignominy.
The ghastly procession crosses the Pont-au-Change, the Quay de la Mégisserie, and passing the Rue de la Monnaie it enters the Rue Saint-Honoré.