For an awful moment the two men and the woman struggled together, she being drawn nearer, nearer the plank. The pearls, last remnant of her guilty greatness, fell from her poor torn bodice on to the dirty boards. Samson stooped to pick them up, and the other man, using brutal force, hurled Madame du Barry to her knees. “Do not hurt me!” she screamed. They seized her again and pitched her forward on to the plank. She strove unavailingly. Samson pulled the cord. She saw and smelt blood and slime; she felt herself being swung forward. She shrieked once–twice–and the knife descended, sending her common blood gushing over the other noble blood that stained the oak and iron. THE ARISTOCRAT “Oh, it would be better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men.”–_Danton in Prison._ On a morning in May, 1794, misty bright with the pure soft glow of a spring sun, a man sat under a hedge on the high-road to Paris, near Clamars, a village close to Bourg-la-Reine. He was in ragged clothes, unshaven, gaunt and pallid; his hair hung damp and dusty round his forehead and neck; his face, which was of aquiline type, had a closed look of physical suffering silently endured; his feet were blistered and bleeding, his dirty stockings had fallen down to his ankles though he had endeavoured to fasten them with wisps of grass; he had neither shoes nor waistcoat; he was thin with the dry horrible thinness of starvation. His eyes, large and deep-set, were flecked with red, and his cracked lips stiffly parted over the white glisten of his teeth. This man was Marie Jean Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, peer of France, famous mathematician, philosopher, man of letters, politician and Girondist, the friend of Liberty, the dreamer of the dream of a respectable Republic and the People ruling gloriously over France, the denouncer of Robespierre and all the excesses of the Revolution, a man famous for his learned book “Esquise sur l’Esprit Humaine” and suchlike, and for the Roman-like tend of his speeches in _the Senate_. Neither birth nor learning nor high-minded endeavour, nor patriotism, nor flinging aside ancient prejudices of birth and joining hands with the people in what he had hoped was an enlightened age, had saved him from this: the ignominy of flight, of hiding, the ignominy of sheer starvation. On the fall of his party and the arrest of his colleagues he had fled, and for two months had been sheltered by friends; but he was too great a man to be forgotten; as the principles he had advocated fell most hopelessly to ruin, as the section he had been associated with became more and more an object of public contempt and hatred, as the bloody tyranny of the Robespierre tribunals grew fiercer and more unrestrained, so did the net begin to close more tightly round the Marquis de Condorcet.