“Stop her!” he yelled. “In God’s name stop her Highness before too late!”
They were jogging on leisurely, and thought him drunk or demented.
“What Highness, Captain?” they said. “There has been none passed this way.”
And on the word there came a loud cry from the rear, and for the third time the cavalcade halted. But von Gastein had sped by like the wind, and reached to where the royal carriage was stopped amid a little cloud of equerries; and a dismayed, small figure stood upon the step by the open door.
“His Majesty,” said the physician, gasping over his words, “has had a stroke, and is dead!”
FOUQUIER-TINVILLE
“If your life has ever known one act of self-sacrifice, bear, for your consolation, its memory to the scaffold.”
With a stiff smile on his lips, and those words of the President of the reconstituted Court in his ears, Antoine Quentin Fouquier de Tinville, late Public Prosecutor to the Revolutionary Tribunal, turned to follow his guard.
This was at seven o’clock of a May evening, and twelve or fourteen hours remained to him in which to collect his thoughts and settle his affairs. At ten on the following morning the tumbrils would arrive at the archway to the Cour du Mai, and he and his fifteen condemned jurymen would start on their long road of agony to the Place de la Révolution, whither, or elsewhere, on a like errand, he himself had already despatched so many thousands.
Those words of the President somehow haunted him.