Another removal, to the Place de la Bastille, and then on 28th July, 1794, the engine of justice or vengeance was back again to end a life and the Reign of Terror in one blow. What life? But listen: "Robespierre," lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his Prison-escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely with bloody linen: a spectacle to men. He lies stretched on a table, a deal-box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol is still clenched convulsively in his hand. Men bully him, insult him: his eyes still indicate intelligence; he speaks no word. 'He had on the sky-blue coat he had got made for the Feast of the Être Suprême'—O Reader, can thy hard heart hold out against that? His trousers were nankeen; the stockings had fallen down over the ankles. He spake no word more in this world.
"And so, at six in the morning, a victorious Convention adjourns. Report flies over Paris as on golden wings; penetrates the Prisons; irradiates the faces of those that were ready to perish: turnkeys and moutons, fallen from their high estate, look mute and blue. It is the 28th day of July, called 10th of Thermidor, year 1794.
"Fouquier had but to identify; his Prisoners being already Out of Law. At four in the afternoon, never before were the streets of Paris seen so crowded. From the Palais de Justice to the Place de la Révolution, for thither again go the Tumbrils this time, it is one dense stirring mass; all windows crammed; the very roofs and ridge-tiles budding forth human Curiosity, in strange gladness. The Death-tumbrils, with their motley Batch of Outlaws, some twenty-three or so, from Maximilien to Mayor Fleuriot and Simon the Cordwainer, roll on. All eyes are on Robespierre's Tumbril, where he, his jaw bound in dirty linen, with his half-dead Brother and half-dead Henriot, lie shattered; their 'seventeen hours' of agony about to end. The Gendarmes point their swords at him, to show the people which is he. A woman springs on the Tumbril; clutching the side of it with one hand, waving the other Sibyl-like; and exclaims: 'The death of thee gladdens my very heart, m'enivre de joie'; Robespierre opened his eyes; 'Scélérat, go down to Hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!'—At the foot of the scaffold, they stretched him on the ground till his turn came. Lifted aloft, his eyes again opened; caught the bloody axe. Samson wrenched the coat off him; wrenched the dirty linen from his jaw: the jaw fell powerless, there burst from him a cry;—hideous to hear and see. Samson, thou canst not be too quick!
"Samson's work done, there bursts forth shout on shout of applause. Shout, which prolongs itself not only over Paris, but over France, but over Europe, and down to this generation. Deservedly, and also undeservedly. O unhappiest Advocate of Arras, wert thou worse than other Advocates? Stricter man, according to his Formula, to his Credo and his Cant, of probities, benevolences, pleasures-of-virtue, and suchlike, lived not in that age. A man fitted, in some luckier settled age, to have become one of those incorruptible barren Pattern-Figures, and have had marble-tablets and funeral-sermons. His poor landlord, the Cabinet-maker in the Rue Saint-Honoré, loved him; his Brother died for him. May God be merciful to him and to us!
"This is the end of the Reign of Terror."
In 1799 the Place won its name Concorde. The next untoward sight that it was to see was Prussian and Russian soldiers encamping there in 1814 and 1815, and in 1815 the British. By this time it had been renamed Place Louis Quinze, which in 1826 was changed to Place Louis Seize, and a project was afoot for raising a monument to that monarch's memory on the spot where he fell. But the Revolution of 1830 intervened, and "Concorde" resumed its sway, and in 1836 Louis-Philippe, the new king (whose father, Philippe Egalité, had perished on the guillotine here), erected the Luxor column, which had been given to him by Mohammed Ali, and had once stood before the great temple of Thebes commemorating on its sides the achievements of Rameses II. Since then certain symbolic statues of the great French cities (including unhappy Strassburg) have been set up, and the Place is a model of symmetry; and at the time that I write (1909) a great part of it is enclosed within hoardings for I know not what purpose, but I hope a subway for the saving of the lives of pedestrians, for it must be the most perilous crossing in the world. One has but to set foot in the roadway and straightway motor-cars and cabs spring out of the earth and converge upon one from every point of the compass, in the amazing French way. Concorde, indeed!
AUTOMOBILE CLUB THE MADELEINE MINISTÈRE DE LA MARINE
THE PLACE DE LA CONCORDE
(LOOKING NORTH)
If the Place de la Concorde may be called at night a congress of lamps, the Champs-Elysées in the afternoon may be said to be a congress of wheels. Wheels in such numbers and revolving at such a pace are never seen in England, not even on the Epsom road on Derby Day. For there is no speed limit for the French motor-car. Nor have we in England anything like this superb roadway, so wide and open, climbing so confidently to the Arc de Triomphe, with its groves on either side at the foot, and the prosperous white mansions afterwards. It is not our way. We English, with our ambition to conquer and administer the world, have neglected our own home; the French, with no ambition any longer to wander beyond their own borders, have made their home beautiful. The energy which we as a nation put into greater Britain, they have put into buildings, into statues, into roads. The result is that we have the Transvaal, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India, but it is the French, foregoing such possessions and all their anxieties, who have the Champs-Elysées.