He was sentenced on the very anniversary of that terrible night on which the men of the Marat Company broke into the prison of Le Bouffay, and he was accompanied in the tumbril by Grandmaison the pitiless, who was now filled with self-pity to such an extent that he wept bitterly.
The crowd, which had hooted and insulted him from the Conciergerie to the Place de Greve, fell suddenly silent as he mounted the scaffold, his step firm, but his shoulders bowed, and his eyes upon the ground.
Suddenly upon the silence, grotesquely, horribly merry, broke the sound of a clarinet playing the “Ca ira!”
Jerking himself erect, Carrier turned and flung the last of his terrible glances at the musician.
A moment later the knife fell with a thud, and a bleeding head rolled into the basket, the eyes still staring, but powerless now to inspire terror.
Upon the general silence broke an echo of the stroke.
“Vlan!” cried a voice. “And there's a fine end to a great drowner!”
It was Leroy the cocassier. The crowd took up the cry.