The candles guttered lower in their sockets, the attendants were putting out even the few lights that still burned; it was time to go. The opera house was emptying fast of all who had danced the night away there; amidst shrieks and whoops and yells the lower class of visitors were departing in coaches and chairs or on foot--some to their homes, but many to the Place de Grève. The spectacle of one man being broken to death and another decapitated was not to be missed.
"They say," exclaimed Sir Charles, as he returned with the cloaks and hoods of the two ladies, "that an execution takes place this morning on the Place de Grève. Hark! you may hear the creatures chattering over it as they go forth. Well, our coachman need not go through the Place, though it is on our road. Surely he can skirt round it. At least, I will bid him do so," and he escorted his wife and Kate to their carriage.
Outside, the crowd that was making its way to the place of execution was stamping down the now fast-falling snow as it fell, and hurrying forward for fear it should be too late for the show. With renewed shrieks and yells it went onward, singing songs and choruses, roaring out ballads that perhaps it deemed suitable to the occasion, beating on tambours-de-basque and little tabours which formed the accompaniments of many of the masquers' costumes, and hammering on doors that were as yet unopened, with their shepherds' crooks and wooden swords (which were allowed to form part of their dress) and canes, and howling at the inhabitants to arise and come forth to le spectacle. They halted very little on their short way, sometimes only to shake the falling snow off their clothes, sometimes to wipe the paint and raddle from their faces which the wet snow had turned into sticky filth, and sometimes to kick over the braziers of the early morning chestnut-sellers, or to run into an early-opened wineshop, hastily gulp down a drink, and then go on again.
"Heavens!" exclaimed Sir Charles, as the slow-progressing coach kept pace with the creatures that passed along the miserable three-foot sideways or crunched along the road--"heavens! what a crowd is a Parisian one! Their laughter is as ferocious in its way as the roughness of our English rabble--nay, I believe, far more deadly. How they revel in what they are going to see!"
"I tell you, my friends," screamed one painted harridan from the sedan chair she was being carried in, to a number of her friends who walked beside it, "that it is a great, a magnificent spectacle. I have seen it, voyez-vous, at Lyons, on the Place Bellecour, often--once, twice, thrice. Ma foi! the shriek at the first blow as the man lies back, his body tied to the wheel, is pénétrant écrasant! And so on, the cries becoming lower, till they are no better than sobs or groans, until the coup de grâce. Then, sometimes, but alas! not always, there will be one more wild shriek, and voilà! c'est fini. After that it is always time for breakfast."
One or two girls in the crowd making its way onward glanced at the ogress in the sedan chair and turned white; and Kate, who had heard all her words, grasped Lady Belrose's hand; while a man, walking steadily along through the snow, answered the woman, saying:
"Peste! 'tis not always as good as that. I waited once all through a summer night at Caen to see a man broken--I remember we played cards, I and the others, in the moonlight, and I lost four gold pistoles--and, dame! the fellow was a favoured one. Favoured, you understand. A vile aristocrat. So, as we thought, they strangled him as they bound him, and, malediction! he suffered not at all. Never screamed once--not once. 'Twas a cruel wrong to the spectators."
"'Tis an aristocrat who suffers to-day, they say," another man exclaimed.
"Nay," screamed still another, "not so. The aristocrat will suffer not; they will but slice his head off with the axe. There is no suffering in that; 'tis done and over in a moment. Yet I would see him die, too. He is an English aristocrat, and I hate all English; one beat me the other day for regarding his flaxen-haired wife too admiringly! I have never seen an Englishman die. They are brutes, yet they have the courage of devils."
"An English aristocrat!" said Sir Charles to his companions. "I do not understand this. There have been no Englishmen arrested in Paris for a longtime; otherwise I must have heard of it among our friends here. What does he mean?"