"Why do they call me the daughter of the guillotine? Doesn't that strike you as odd?" And she threw upon her companion a quick, cunning glance, as though to surprise the momentary confusion that would expose her real knowledge. Thermidor began with the hecatombs from the pretended Conspiracy of the Prisons, and the transfer of the guillotine to the Barrière du Trône Renversé. The great rolling biers, attended by the scum of the city, bore each day to the scaffold their thirty, forty, sixty victims. Even the Faubourg St. Antoine, satiated and appalled, began to grumble, while from time to time voices broke out in protestation, willing from mere lassitude to end the spectacle by their own sacrifice. On the 6th of Thermidor, almost at the side of Louison, a bouquetière, her comrade, cried out: "I am sick of it! Robespierre is a scoundrel. They kill too many people. I want to die." The next day she was on the scaffold, looking down indifferently, contented to end the fatigue of surfeited disgust. Louison laughed aloud. "Why do you laugh?" her neighbor said. "What has she done to you?" "I do not laugh at her," she answered impatiently. "I laughed because I told her I would go first." Her companion edged away. The tricoteuses, stopping their needles, counted: "Forty-eight!" At that moment Louison beheld Dossonville on the outskirts of the crowd. Seizing the girl nearest to her, a child of fifteen, by the shoulder, she cried, with a furious gesture: "Jeanneton, do you see that fellow over there? He thinks I can't see him, the fool! As though I cared!" The child struggled to free herself, but Louison, without relaxing her hold, transferred her look to the scaffold. Twice again the murmur rose: "Forty-nine!" "Fifty!" "Do you know what I am wondering?" Louison said suddenly to the child whimpering in her clutch. "How strange it must feel to be there." All at once, releasing the frightened Jeanneton, she advanced toward the guillotine, as though irresistibly sucked into the maelstrom, stopped, drew her hand across her forehead, then, facing the crowd, flung away her basket of flowers and shouted: "Vive le Roi!" In an instant she was surrounded, while everywhere the cries went up: "She is mad!" "She is drunk!" "We have seen it for weeks." "She is not responsible." "She is a patriot." Others insisted: "Arrest her!" "The Nation is insulted!" "No favor!" About the fringes of the crowd they questioned excitedly, running to and fro: "Who is it?" "Louison." "Impossible!" "Yes, Louison." "She is mad!" About her the mass struggled and swayed, some crying to her to simulate drunkenness, others clamoring for her arrest. In the center, Louison, alone calm and indifferent, secure in the knowledge of what must follow, continued to regard the silhouette of the guillotine, while about her lips was that curious smile which is seen only on the face of the martyr or the insane. XIV