She put her hands over her face; these others might well be brave, she thought; they were dying for all they believed in, for the sake of what they were, but she had nothing to die for. All she had, all she had ever had, was her beauty, and death would take that from her–and what was left?
Death presented itself to her as an intolerable blackness; she could not, she would not face it. She would resist. They could not be such fiends as to drag her to her death.
She clenched her hands. She heard the words they were throwing at her; a sense of rage nerved her against them. She hated them, especially the women. She lifted her head, and her blue eyes had a hot brilliance like madness.
“I am not a wicked woman!” she cried out fiercely, looking over the sea of haggard, angry faces. “What I did any of you women here would have done had it been offered to you as it was offered to me!”
Such of the women who could hear these words replied by a rush of fury that nearly upset the cart, and tried to pull the speaker down among them; the soldiers drove them back, and one man struck Madame du Barry with the flat of his sword and violently bade her be silent.
She crouched down, hiding her eyes and her ears. A little cold rain began to fall; she felt it on her head and shivered.
The cart stopped. She dropped her stiff fingers and looked up; she was face to face with the final horror.
A platform surrounded with soldiers in the midst of an open place crowded with people; at one side a palace and trees–the great square once named after her lover, Louis XV.
From the centre of the platform rose the hideous machine itself, the guillotine, with two tall upright posts dyed red, the plank, the basket, the cloth, a man in a dark coat holding a cord, all outlined against a grey tumultuous sky and the leafless, dry trees of November.
The prisoners began to descend from the cart, began to ascend the steps to the guillotine amid the murmurs and yells of the haggard feverish crowd.