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“So what! We can leave Paris, nothing’s stopping us. So let’s not bewail our fate. My uncle’s waiting for us at Saint-Omer—money, passports, the lot. No gendarme is going to arrest us. What do you think? We only stay because we want to.”

“No, that’s rubbish and you know it, my excellent friend, devoted soul that you are.… You stay because I want to stay.”

“And you want to stay because you want to find Geneviève. Well then, what could be more simple, more right and natural? You think she’s in jail, which is more than likely. You want to look out for her, and to do that you can’t leave Paris.”

Maurice gave a sigh. It was obvious his thoughts were elsewhere.

“You remember the death of Louis XVI?” he asked. “I can still see myself, wan with emotion and pride. I was one of the leaders of the pack I’m hiding among today. I was higher and mightier at the foot of this scaffold than the King who mounted it ever had been. What a difference, Lorin! Who’d have thought it? And when you think it has only taken nine months to bring about such a terrible turnaround!”

“Nine months of love, Maurice! … ‘Love, you sank Troy!’ ”

Maurice sighed once more; his vagabond thoughts took another turn, scanned another horizon.

“That poor Maison-Rouge,” he murmured. “This is a sad day for him.”

“Alas!” said Lorin. “Do you want to know what I think is the saddest thing about revolutions, Maurice?”

“Yes.”

“It’s that your enemies are often people you’d like to have as friends, and your friends people …”

“There’s one thing I have trouble believing,” Maurice cut in.

“Which is?”

“That he won’t come up with some plan, crazy as it may be, to save the Queen.”

“One man against a hundred thousand?”

“I said, crazy as it may be … Me, I know that, to save Geneviève …”

Lorin frowned. “I say again, Maurice, you’re losing the plot. Even if you had to save Geneviève, you wouldn’t become a bad citizen. But that’s enough of that; people can hear us, Maurice, they’re listening. Hey! Heads are starting to sway; wait, there’s citizen Sanson’s valet standing up on his basket and peering into the distance. The Austrian woman is heading for us.”

Indeed, as though to accompany the undulation Lorin had remarked, a prolonged and growing shudder invaded the crowd. It was like one of those gusts of wind that begin by blowing and end by howling.

Maurice increased his considerable height still further by standing on the base of the lamppost and looked toward the rue Saint-Honoré. “Yes,” he said with a shiver. “Here she is!”

They could just glimpse another machine almost as hideous as the guillotine, and that was the cart. To left and right the arms of the escort gleamed, and out in front Grammont responded with the flashing of his saber to the cries of the odd fanatic.

But as the cart drew nearer all cries suddenly died out under the imperious and somber gaze of the condemned woman. Never had a face imposed respect so forcefully; never had Marie Antoinette been greater and more of a queen. She took the pride of her courage to such heights as to strike terror into the hearts of all those who looked upon her.

Indifferent to the exhortations of the abbé Girard, who had stuck with her in defiance of her will, she stood looking straight ahead without glancing either left or right. Whatever thoughts were burning in her mind they shone forth with the rigidity of a conviction in her immutable gaze. The jerky movement of the cart over the uneven cobblestones, by its very violence, further emphasized the inflexible erectness of her deportment; you’d have said a marble statue was being paraded on a chariot; but the royal statue had luminous eyes and her shorn hair was blowing about in tufts in the wind.

A silence like the silence of the desert suddenly battened down on the three hundred thousand spectators of this scene, which the sun shone down upon for the very first time.

Soon, from where Maurice and Lorin were standing, you could hear the screeching of the cart’s axle and the snorting of the guards’ heavy