the 4th May, 1763, he was removed from the Bastille to the prison of the Conciergerie, which adjoined the Court of Parliament. "Though it was but one o'clock in the morning when he arrived at the Conciergerie (to quote the report of his condemnation), he refused to go to bed; and about seven he appeared before his judges. They ordered him to be divested of his red riband and cross, to which he submitted with the most perfect indifference; and he was then placed on the stool to undergo a new course of interrogation." At that crisis a pang of bitterness shot through his heart; clasping his hands, and raising his eyes-- "My God!" he exclaimed; "oh, my God! is _this the reward_ of forty years faithful service as a soldier?" The interrogatory lasted six hours, and D'Ache and De Bussy were successively examined against him. By nine in the evening the examination was over, and the count was re-conducted to the Bastille, surrounded by guards and several companies of the watch of Paris. At six o'clock next morning the judges delivered their opinions, which were so various, that the clock of the Conciergerie struck four in the afternoon before they came to a conclusion and pronounced their _arret_ or decree, which contained a brief recital of the charges against De Lally, without specifying the facts on which they were respectively founded; but for the reparation of which it was declared that he should be stripped of all his civil titles, his military rank, and dignities; that all his property should be confiscated to the king; and that his head should be struck from his body on the public scaffold. Without emotion the count had heard their sentence, and with the utmost resolution prepared to die; yet he was detained, hovering as it were between life and death, until the morning of the 9th May, 1766, when he was drawn on a hurdle to the _Place de Greve_, and hastily, almost privately, beheaded, with his mouth filled by a wooden gag, to prevent him addressing the people--thus adding another to the many barbarous judicial murders which disgrace the annals of France. His son, Trophine Gerard, who had been kept at the College of Harcourt in entire ignorance of his birth and of the proceedings against his father, only learned all these secrets when the public interest and commiseration became too great to conceal them longer. On the 9th the poor boy learned that the great General Lally, who was to die, _was his father_. He rushed, as he tells us, to the place of execution to bid this father, so recently found, "an eternal adieu--to let him hear the voice of a son amid the voices of his executioners, and embrace him on the scaffold when he was about to perish;" but he arrived only in time to see the axe descending and his father's blood pouring from a dismembered trunk upon a sanded scaffold. Overcome with horror, Trophine--afterwards the great Count Lally Tollendal--swooned in the street, and was borne away insensible to the College of Harcourt.