So all night long the dreadful litany proceeded. Men left the hall to take an hour or two of sleep, a snatch of food; yet the hall seemed always full despite the coming and going of single figures, and through the long, cold darkness of that misty weather history heard voice after voice, weak, strong, ashamed, defiant, pitiful, muffled, outspoken, bass, treble, old, and young, repeating at irregular intervals: “Death absolute”; “Death with respite”; “Banishment”; “Imprisonment.” And history saw, after each such speech or cry (for many spoke as well before they declared the doom), an isolated man, high upon the tribune, beneath the candles, bending over the register and signing to what he had determined and proclaimed. The dull dawn of winter broke through a leaden sky. No eastern window received it. The tall, gaunt casements of the southern wall overlooking the Tuileries Gardens grew gradually into lighter oblongs of gray. The candles paled and were extinguished. Hardly a third of the list was done. All that short January day (Thursday, the seventeenth of January) the dreadful thing proceeded until darkness fell again, until once more the chandeliers were lit. Once more it was night, and they were still voting, still declaring. At last, when more than twenty-four hours had passed, the business was over. No one was left to come forward to the tribune; and this great sleepless mass, within which some few had noted one by one the voices as they fell, and had already calculated the issue, waited for the counting of the votes and for the recounting. Not only by word of [Illustration: REPUBLICAN SOLDIERS IN THE REVOLUTION _To face p. 202_ ] mouth, nor only by the signing of the register, had the precision of so awful an event been secured, but one by one the votes had been written down, folded, and sealed. The clerks of the Parliament opened each packet and arranged the sentences in rows, according to their tenor: for death absolute, for imprisonment, for delay. So one hour went past, and then another; but in the third, when it was perhaps ten o’clock, at night this silent process was interrupted, and the many that had fallen asleep, or were nodding half asleep after such a vigil, looked up surprised to hear that two letters had reached the assembly, one from some agent of the Bourbon king in Spain to demand a respite; the other from the advocates of the king, who demanded to be heard once more before the chair should announce the result of the voting.