long time past; none have
rejoiced my heart so much. Thank you for it. I kiss you a thousand
times. You indeed will have my last thought. Ah, my darling, why am I
not with you in a wilderness rather than in Orleans?"

A few days later news reached Madame du Barry that her lover, with other
prisoners, was to be brought from Orleans to Paris. He would thus
actually pass her own door; she would at least see him once again, under
however tragic conditions. With what leaden steps the intervening hours
crawled by! Each sound set her heart beating furiously as if it would
choke her. Each moment was an agony of anticipation. At last she hears
the sound of coming feet. She flies to the window, piercing the dark
night with straining eyes. The sound grows nearer, a tumult of trampling
feet and hoarse cries. A mob of dark figures surges through her gates,
pours riotously up the steps and through the open door. In the hall
there is a pandemonium of cries and oaths; the door of her room is burst
open, and something is flung at her feet. She glances down; and, with a
gasp of unspeakable horror, looks down on the severed head of her lover,
red with his blood.

The _sans-culottes_ had indeed taken a terrible revenge. They had
fallen in overwhelming numbers on the prisoners and their escort; the
soldiers had fled; and de Brissac found himself the centre of a mob, the
helpless target of a hundred murderous blows. With a knife for sole
weapon he fought valiantly, like the brave soldier he was, until a
cowardly blow from behind felled him to the ground. "Fire at me with
your pistols," he shouted, "your work will the sooner be over." A few
moments later he drew his last gallant breath, almost within sight of
the house that sheltered his beloved.

* * * * *

United in life, the lovers were not long to be divided. "Since that
awful day," Madame du Barry wrote to a friend, "you can easily imagine
what my grief has been. They have consummated the frightful crime, the
cause of my misery and my eternal regrets--my grief is complete--a life
which ought to have been so grand and glorious! Good God, what an end!"

Thus cruelly deprived of all that made life worth living, she cared
little how soon the end came. "I ask nothing now of life," she wrote,
"but that it should quickly give me back to him." And her prayer was
soon to be granted. A few months after that night of horrors she herself
was awaiting the guillotin