All Paris was under arms on this morning of the 16th of October. The roll of the drum was heard through all the sections; thirty thousand troops lined the streets along which lay the route of the queen’s passage. The bridges were guarded with cannon, by which stood the gunners with lighted matches. Artillery was placed also upon the squares and points of junction. At ten o’clock no carriage was allowed in any of the streets that lie between the Conciergerie and the Place de la Revolution. All Paris was patrolled, and all this martial pomp, which sounds as though the army of the enemy were at the very gates of Paris, had been brought out to see a woman die!
Before the Conciergerie, before those beautiful iron gates on which the royal arms of France and the golden lilies are conspicuous, the crowd was thickest; every window had its groups of spectators, every housetop had its crowd of people.
There stands the wretched open cart, with its single horse, its plank the only seat. There is a stir among the crowd, and the queen ascends the prison steps. On seeing the cart, she makes an involuntary pause. It is but an instant. Then, with proud step and undaunted mien, Marie Antoinette advances. A moment more, and she is sealed in the cart. Sanson takes his place behind her.
Both he and his assistant have their three-cornered hats under their arms. “On that occasion the only people who behaved with decency were the executioners.”
Slowly the cart winds its way through the Rue Saint-Honoré. The rabble yell, shout, and mouth at her, while for the last time falls on her ear that hateful cry, “À bas l’Autrichienne! à bas l’Autrichienne!”
Yet as much a queen is she,—this silent white-robed figure, so simple, yet so grand in its forlornness,—as when in her gilded coach, surrounded by a brilliant body-guard of cavalry, she swept through the Avenue des Champs Élysées, to the echoing shouts of “Vive la reine!”
“You all know the Place de la Concorde,
’Tis hard by the Tuileries’ wall.
’Mid terraces, fountains, and statues,
There rises an obelisk tall.”