It was Mother Carron who recovered some sort of sanity first among us. It was Mother Carron who gathered the fainting girl and passed her over to the charge of the nuns; Mother Carron who had forethought to snatch one of Carron's jackets from a hook; Mother Carron, finally, who slipped that jacket onto Bibi-Ri and buttoned it carefully to the chin before she would order the door unbarred.
"Well, well—so we land her in the church after all," observed that remarkable woman briskly, at the last. "Chouette, alors! It is honest, at least.... And now, stupid, open up and admit the happy bridegroom and let him see what he can see!"
He saw, right enough. He saw as much as was needful. When the door thrust inward, when his two rogue friends of military surveillants rushed through, when that tall devil in long black redingote and high hat, with his flaming yellow eyes and raging front—when M. de Nou himself, I say, confronted us—there we were properly ranged as the actors in a perfectly obvious police case of brawl and murder: prisoner, witnesses, corpus delicti and the succoring clergy: complete.
"What does this mean?" he demanded.
Bibi-Ri faced him—a strange meeting, in truth!
"Me," he said, with his old trick of whimsy. "Only me. Convict 2232. I've been developing my capabilities a little.... That's all!"
So they guillotined Bibi-Ri. In due course, by due process, he passed before the Marine Tribunal, before the Commandant and the Procurator General and the Director and the rest of our salaried philanthropists. They dealt with him faithfully and of a gray early morning they led him from the little door of the condemned cell. They marched him out with his legs hobbled and his hands tied behind his back; with the chaplain tottering at his side and the bayonets of the guard shining martially file and file: with some of the chiefest of these judges to receive him and some hundreds of us convicts drawn up below to do him honor.
Such was the method of his elevation, you will perceive: such the means by which he attained his ambitions, his uplifted position in the world—when he climbed the scaffold in the courtyard of the central prison on Ile de Nou and took his final look on life.
I was there. For my complicity at Mother Carron's that night and my refusal to testify at the trial they had shipped me back to the Collective. I stood in the front row. I was among those felons whose special privilege is their compulsory attendance at executions. I could miss nothing. Not a word nor a movement. Not the hurried mumbling of the death sentence. Not the ruffling of the drums that covered the fatal preparations.... Not even the icy chill to the marrow when we sank there in our ranks on the damp flagstones.