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“It is my wish,” said the Queen with a gesture of the hand that was pure Maria Theresa.1

Girard came away. Maison-Rouge tried to see into the gap in the screen, but the prisoner had turned her back. The executioner’s aide crossed the priest’s path; he had arrived bringing ropes.

The two gendarmes pushed the Knight back as far as the door before he could utter a cry or make a move to accomplish his plan, dazed, desperate, and stunned as he was. And so he found himself with Girard in the corridor by the wicket gate. From the corridor they were pushed back as far as the office, where the news of the Queen’s rejection of the juror priest had already spread and where Marie Antoinette’s Austrian arrogance was already the subject of gross abuse for some, and for others a source of secret admiration.

“Off you go,” said Richard to the priest. “Go home, since she’s chasing you away. Let her die the way she wants to.”

“Listen,” said Mother Richard, “she’s right and I’d do the same.”

“And you’d be wrong, citizeness,” said the priest.

“Shut up, woman,” muttered the concierge, raising his eybrows. “It’s got nothing to do with you. Go, Father, go.”

“No,” Girard said. “No. I’ll go with her whether she likes it or not.

A word, just one single word, if she hears it, will remind her of her duties. Besides, the Commune gave me a mission … and I must obey the Commune.”

“So be it, but send your sacristan back, then,” barked the adjudant major commanding the armed forces, a former actor from the Comédie-Française2 named Grammont.3

The eyes of the Knight flashed like twin bolts of lightning and he automatically went for his chest. Girard knew he had a dagger under his vest and stopped him with an imploring look.

“Spare my life,” he said in a very low voice. “You haven’t got a chance, don’t throw away your own life too with hers; I’ll speak to her about you during the procession, I swear to you. I will tell her what you risked to see her one last time.”

These words sobered the young man somewhat. In any case, the usual reaction was in operation, with his whole nervous system undergoing a strange kind of collapse. This man whose will was so heroic, whose might so marvelous, had come to the end of his hope, the end of his will. He floated, irresolute and weary, defeated, in a sort of somnolent state one would have taken for an early warning sign of death.

“Yes,” he said. “This is exactly as it should be: the cross for Jesus, the scaffold for her. Gods and kings drink the chalice men offer them to the last dregs.”

With that thought in mind—so resigned, so passive—the chevalier let himself be pushed and shoved with complete acceptance, without defending himself in any way, though he did make a kind of involuntary groan. He was pushed and shoved right to the outer door without putting up any more resistance than Ophelia,4 that devotee of death, when she saw herself being washed away by the waves.

At the foot of the doors and gates of the Conciergerie, one of those terrifying crowds was milling, the sort of crowd you can’t imagine unless you’ve see one at close range at least once. Impatience dominated every other passion, and every other passion declared itself for all the world to hear, so that the combined noise was voluminous and immensely prolonged—as though all the noise of Paris and its entire population were concentrated on the quartier of the Palais de Justice.

At the head of the crowd an entire army was camped, with cannon aimed at protecting the procession festivities and making everything safe for those who had come for the entertainment.

There was no way anyone could break through this thick rampart, which was building little by little since news of the Queen’s condemnation had spread outside Paris, with patriots from the faubourgs and outlying areas joining in the fray.

Ejected from the Conciergerie, Maison-Rouge naturally found himself in the front row of soldiers. The soldiers asked him who he was. He replied that he was abbé Girard’s curate but that, having sworn allegiance to the Republic like his priest,