Part 167 (2/2)

”Ah! yes, yes,” cried Marguerite; ”here!”

And she unfastened from her neck a small gold reliquary suspended from a chain of the same metal.

”Here,” said she, ”is a holy relic which I have worn from childhood. My mother put it around my neck when I was very little and she still loved me. It was given me by my uncle, Pope Clement and has never left me.

Take it! take it!”

La Mole took it, and kissed it pa.s.sionately.

”They are at the door,” said the jailer; ”flee, ladies, flee!”

The two women rushed behind the altar and disappeared.

At the same moment the priest entered.

CHAPTER LX.

THE PLACE SAINT JEAN EN GReVE.

It was seven o'clock in the morning, and a noisy crowd was waiting in the squares, the streets, and on the quays. At six o'clock a tumbril, the same in which after their duel the two friends had been conveyed half dead to the Louvre, had started from Vincennes and slowly crossed the Rue Saint Antoine. Along its route the spectators, so huddled together that they crushed one another, seemed like statues with fixed eyes and open mouths.

This day there was to be a heartrending spectacle offered by the queen mother to the people of Paris.

On some straw in the tumbril, we have mentioned, which was making its way through the streets, were two young men, bareheaded, and entirely clothed in black, leaning against each other. Coconnas supported on his knees La Mole, whose head hung over the sides of the tumbril, and whose eyes wandered vaguely here and there.

The crowd, eager to see even the bottom of the vehicle, crowded forward, lifted itself up, stood on tiptoe, mounted posts, clung to the angles of the walls, and appeared satisfied only when it had succeeded in seeing every detail of the two bodies which were going from the torture to death.

It had been rumored that La Mole was dying without having confessed one of the charges imputed to him; while, on the contrary, Coconnas, it was a.s.serted, could not endure the torture, and had revealed everything.

So there were cries on all sides:

”See the red-haired one! It was he who confessed! It was he who told everything! He is a coward, and is the cause of the other's death! The other is a brave fellow, and confessed nothing.”

The two young men heard perfectly, the one the praises, the other the reproaches, which accompanied their funeral march; and while La Mole pressed the hands of his friend a sublime expression of scorn lighted up the face of the Piedmontese, who from the foul tumbril gazed upon the stupid mob as if he were looking down from a triumphal car.

Misfortune had done its heavenly work, and had enn.o.bled the face of Coconnas, as death was about to render divine his soul.

”Are we nearly there?” asked La Mole. ”I can stand no more, my friend. I feel as if I were going to faint.”

”Wait! wait! La Mole, we are pa.s.sing by the Rue Tizon and the Rue Cloche Percee; look! look!”

”Oh! raise me, raise me, that I may once more gaze on that happy abode.”

Coconnas raised his hand and touched the shoulder of the executioner, who sat at the front of the tumbril driving.

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