these troops at intervals. A whole squadron of dragoons was ranged in
battle array beneath the terraces of the Tuileries. What was called the
Battalion of Marseilles formed one of the sides of the square.

The guillotine--it is always with repugnance that one writes this
hideous word--would appear to the craftsmen of to-day to be very badly
constructed. The knife was simply suspended to a pulley fixed in the
centre of the upper beam. This pulley and a rope the thickness of a
man's thumb constituted the whole apparatus. The knife, which was not
very heavily weighted, was of small dimensions and had a curved edge,
which gave it the form of a reversed Phrygian cap. No hood was placed
to shelter the King's head and at the same time to hide and circumscribe
its fall. All that crowd could see the head of Louis XVI. drop, and it
was thanks to chance, thanks perhaps to the smallness of the knife which
diminished the violence of the shock, that it did not bound beyond
the basket to the pavement. Terrible incident, which often occurred
at executions during the Terror. Nowadays assassins and poisoners are
decapitated more decently. Many improvements in the guillotine have been
made.

At the spot where the King's head fell, a long rivulet of blood streamed
down the planks of the scaffold to the pavement. When the execution was
over, Samson threw to the people the King's coat, which was of white
molleton, and in an instant it disappeared, torn by a thousand hands.

At the moment when the head of Louis XVI. fell, the Abbe Edgeworth was
still near the King. The blood spirted upon him. He hastily donned a
brown overcoat, descended from the scaffold and was lost in the crowd.
The first row of spectators opened before him with a sort of wonder
mingled with respect; but after he had gone a few steps, the attention
of everybody was still so concentrated upon the centre of the Place
where the event had just been accomplished, that nobody took any further
notice of Abbe Edgeworth.

The poor priest, enveloped in his thick coat which concealed the blood
with which he was covered, fled in bewilderment, walking as one in a
dream and scarcely knowing where he was going. However, with that sort
of instinct which preserves somnambulists he crossed the river, took the
Rue du Bac, then the Rue du Regard and thus managed to reach the house
of Mme. de Lezardiere, near the Barriere du Maine.

Arrived there he divested himself of his soiled clothing