No words answered him, but Latour turned and looked full into the eyes of Lucien Bruslart.
The tumbrils went forward slowly, a yelling mob on every side.
"Lucien! Lucien! Look at me!"
It was a woman's cry, shrill, sounding above the uproar.
Shaking with fear, yet perhaps with a glimmer of hope still in his heart, Bruslart looked. There was a woman held high above the crowd, supported and steadied by strong men's arms.
"I said you should see me laugh. Look, Lucien! I laugh at you."
"It is a mistake. Save me, Pauline, save me!"
"I laugh, Lucien," and a shriek of laughter, mad, riotous, fiendish, cut like a sharp knife through all that yelling confusion.
With a cry of rage, despair, and terror, Bruslart sank trembling in a heap to the floor of the tumbril. Latour did not move. He had not turned to look at Pauline Vaison. The thought of another woman was in his soul. Was she safe?
There was a pause, the crowd was so dense at this corner; then the tumbril moved on again. The corner was turned. Straight before him looked Raymond Latour, over the multitude of heads, over the waving arms and red caps, straight before him across the Place de la Revolution to the guillotine, to the blue sky, sunlit, against which it rose—and beyond.