At six o'clock next morning the judges delivered their opinions, which were so various, that the clock of the Conciergerie struck four in the afternoon before they came to a conclusion and pronounced their arrêt or decree, which contained a brief recital of the charges against De Lally, without specifying the facts on which they were respectively founded; but for the reparation of which it was declared that he should be stripped of all his civil titles, his military rank, and dignities; that all his property should be confiscated to the king; and that his head should be struck from his body on the public scaffold.
Without emotion the count had heard their sentence, and with the utmost resolution prepared to die; yet he was detained, hovering as it were between life and death, until the morning of the 9th May, 1766, when he was drawn on a hurdle to the Place de Grève, and hastily, almost privately, beheaded, with his mouth filled by a wooden gag, to prevent him addressing the people—thus adding another to the many barbarous judicial murders which disgrace the annals of France.
His son, Trophine Gerard, who had been kept at the College of Harcourt in entire ignorance of his birth and of the proceedings against his father, only learned all these secrets when the public interest and commiseration became too great to conceal them longer. On the 9th the poor boy learned that the great General Lally, who was to die, was his father. He rushed, as he tells us, to the place of execution to bid this father, so recently found, "an eternal adieu—to let him hear the voice of a son amid the voices of his executioners, and embrace him on the scaffold when he was about to perish;" but he arrived only in time to see the axe descending and his father's blood pouring from a dismembered trunk upon a sanded scaffold. Overcome with horror, Trophine—afterwards the great Count Lally Tollendal—swooned in the street, and was borne away insensible to the College of Harcourt.
Thus in his sixty-fourth year terminated the eventful career of Count Lally, the victim surrendered by a weak and tyrannical ministry to popular clamour, affording by his fate a memorable instance of the injustice, ingratitude, and barbarity of the Court of Versailles.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The MS. original of these interesting instructions was presented to Charles Grant, Viscount de Vaux, by the directors of the English East India Company.
[2] The 79th, or Draper's Regiment, lost in this siege, and encounters before it, thirty-four officers, whose names were inscribed on a beautiful cenotaph, erected on Clifton Downs by Colonel Sir W. Draper and which he dedicated as,
"Sacred to the Memory of those departed Warriors,
Of the Seventy-ninth Regiment,
By whose Valour, Discipline, and Perseverance
The French land Forces in Asia were first withstood and repulsed."