“Have you finished?” said the inquisitor. “No,” said Jeanne. “I have not mentioned a silver syringe concealed under the staircase!”
Meanwhile the horses of destiny stamped with impatience, and spectators were knocking at the prison gate. When they put her, already half dead, on the little cart, she bent her head and grew pale. The Du Barry alone—a sinner without redemption.
She saw the people in the square of Louis XV; she struck her breast three times and murmured: “It is my fault!” But this Christian resignation abandoned her when she mounted the scaffold—there where the statue of Louis XV had been—and she implored of the executioner:
“One moment, Mr. Executioner! One moment more!”
But the executioner was pitiless Sanson. It was block and the knife—without the “one moment!”
Such was the last bed of the Du Barry. Had the almanac of Liège only predicted to her that the one who would lead her to her bed for the last time would not be a King but a citizen executioner, it might have been—but why moralize?
Robert Arnot