"Correct," said he to the guard, chuckling, and the guard needed no more. They began to drag the "sheep" away.
The "sheep" was Jude.
"I am yours—you promised me my life," he desperately screamed back. The Admiral smiled contemptuously; his eyes were very bright and hard.
"I promised that Répentigny should die first; you afterwards; I grant you the privilege of going second." The Sans-culottes, their noisy laughs resounding through the corridor and echoed by the baying of the mastiffs, dragged the spy away.
La Tour could not move the Admiral to any leniency for Germain. The bandit followed each of his prayers by a sinister silence. At length la Tour was compelled by lack of time to give him up and speed to the revolutionary tribunal itself, in session underneath. He was just in time to make his appeal, for Lecour was already brought before the jury and the five judges.
The strenuous efforts of Hugues were nullified by the persistent refusal of the Canadian to take advantage of the device proposed to him, by his would-be preserver—of declaring himself a non-aristocrat. La Tour vehemently urged him at least to cry—"Vive la Republique!" At that Lecour seemed to conceive an idea, and stepping forward cried instead in a voice of decision—
"Long live the King!"
His sentence was signed immediately.
Sanson's death-carts rolled into the courtyard. The hour for the daily public show had arrived. The rest of the prisoners on trial were peremptorily shoved through the mill of condemnation and all were hustled up to the toilette of the executioner. Hands tied, hair cut, feet bared, half a dozen were pushed up into each cart, seated three on a side, and the carts set out. Seven in the line, the roughest, rudest vehicles in the town, they jerked over the uneven cobbles, rumbled across the Pont-Neuf, and crept along the Rue de la Monnaie and then along the Rue Honoré, regardless, both they, their carters, their executioner's men, and their Dragoon escorts, of the agony they freighted. The streets themselves wore unfeeling faces. The merchants had closed their shutters and across the façades of many houses were large inscriptions such as, "The Republic One and Indivisible," "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death." And the sun poured down its untempered rays on the condemned. But more pitiless than carts or streets or sun were the coarse Jacobins who ran alongside.
With what fine wit they shouted—