uch delicate
temperaments--and now living apart from his wife. He had heard, as all
Paris had heard, every detail of the affair, and of the trial, and he
waited there, curious to see this woman, with whose deed he was secretly
in sympathy.

The tumbril slowly approached, the groans and execrations swelled up
around him, and at last he beheld her--beautiful, serene, full of
life, a still smile upon her lips. For a long moment he gazed upon her,
standing as if stricken into stone. Then heedless of those about him,
he bared his head, and thus silently saluted and paid homage to her. She
did not see him. He had not thought that she would. He saluted her as
the devout salute the unresponsive image of a saint. The tumbril crawled
on. He turned his head, and followed her with his eyes for awhile; then,
driving his elbows into the ribs of those about him, he clove himself a
passage through the throng, and so followed, bare-headed now, with fixed
gaze, a man entranced.

He was at the foot of the scaffold when her head fell. To the last he
had seen that noble countenance preserve its immutable calm, and in
the hush that followed the sibilant fall of the great knife his voice
suddenly rang out.

"She is greater than Brutus!" was his cry; and he added, addressing
those who stared at him in stupefaction: "It were beautiful to have died
with her!"

He was suffered to depart unmolested. Chiefly, perhaps because at that
moment the attention of the crowd was upon the executioner's attendant,
who, in holding up Charlotte's truncated head, slapped the cheek with
his hand. The story runs that the dead face reddened under the blow.
Scientists of the day disputed over this, some arguing from it a proof
that consciousness does not at once depart the brain upon decapitation.

That night, while Paris slept, its walls were secretly placarded with
copies of a eulogy of Charlotte Corday, the martyr of Republicanism, the
deliverer of France, in which occurs the comparison with Joan of Arc,
that other great heroine of France. This was the work of Adam Lux.
He made no secret of it. The vision of her had so wrought upon the
imagination of this susceptible dreamer, had fired his spirit with such
enthusiasm, that he was utterly reckless in yielding to his emotions, in
expressing the phrenetic, immaterial love with which in her last moments
of life she had inspired him.

Two days after her execution he issued a long manifesto, in which he
urged t