Tuileries, which, neglected and left at the mercy of the public had
become an unsightly waste of dirt heaps and trenches; and over these
melancholy edifices, over these black, leafless trees, over this gloomy
multitude, the bleak, sombre sky of a winter morning, and one will have
an idea of the aspect which the Place de la Revolution presented at the
moment when Louis XVI., in the carriage of the Mayor of Paris, dressed
in white, the Book of Psalms clasped in his hands, arrived there to die
at a few minutes after ten o'clock on January 21, 1793.

Strange excess of abasement and misery: the son of so many kings, bound
and sacred like the kings of Egypt, was to be consumed between two
layers of quicklime, and to this French royalty, which at Versailles had
had a throne of gold and at St. Denis sixty sarcophagi of granite, there
remained but a platform of pine and a wicker coffin.

Here are some unknown details. The executioners numbered four; two only
performed the execution; the third stayed at the foot of the ladder, and
the fourth was on the waggon which was to convey the King's body to the
Madeleine Cemetery and which was waiting a few feet from the scaffold.

The executioners wore breeches, coats in the French style as the
Revolution had modified it, and three-cornered hats with enormous
tri-colour cockades.

They executed the King with their hats on, and it was without taking his
hat off that Samson, seizing by the hair the severed head of Louis XVI.,
showed it to the people, and for a few moments let the blood from it
trickle upon the scaffold.

At the same time his valet or assistant undid what were called "les
sangles" (straps); and, while the crowd gazed alternately upon the
King's body, dressed entirely in white, as I have said, and still
attached, with the hands bound behind the back, to the swing board,
and upon that head whose kind and gentle profile stood out against the
misty, sombre trees of the Tuileries, two priests, commissaries of
the Commune, instructed to be present, as Municipal officials, at
the execution of the King, sat in the Mayor's carriage, laughing and
conversing in loud tones. One of them, Jacques Roux, derisively drew the
other's attention to Capet's fat calves and abdomen.

The armed men who surrounded the scaffold had only swords and pikes;
there were very few muskets. Most of them wore large round hats or red
caps. A few platoons of mounted dragoons in uniform were mingled with