Outside this the guards were drawn up, and a roomy carriage of the sort that was then hired in the streets by the wealthy stood at the entrance. Two policemen armed with muskets were awaiting him at the carriage door. As Louis appeared, one of these men got in and took his seat with his back to the horses. Then the king entered, sitting in his proper place upon the right, facing him, and motioned to the priest, Edgeworth, to sit beside him. When they were both thus seated, the second policeman took his place opposite, and he and his colleague set their guns before them. The door was shut, the cab started at a foot’s pace. As they came out on the broad streets (for they followed the boulevards), they could see upon each side of the way, three or four ranks deep, the soldiery and militia which guarded those trod miles through the town. There was no crowd on the pavement behind the ranks of soldiers, or at least but few spectators, and a curious observer might have noted how few and rare were the uniforms, how many of the thousands aligned were clothed in workman’s dress or in the mere remnants of military coats. Even the windows of the uneven houses they passed (the boulevards were then but half built) gaped empty, and no one stood at the doors. Before the carriage marched a great multitude of men, all enregimented in some sort of troop, and the greater part of them drummers. These last drummed incessantly, so that this long and very slow procession was confused and deafened with a loud and ceaseless sound. Paris heard that sound rolling up afar from the eastward, crashing past its houses, lost again toward the west. It was close upon eleven o’clock when the carriage came before the unfinished columns of the Madeleine and turned into the Rue Royale. Louis was reading from a book the Psalms which his confessor had pointed out to him when he noticed that the carriage had stopped. He looked up, turned to the priest, and said in a low voice: “Unless I am mistaken, we are there?” The priest did not answer. They had come to that wide open space which is now called the Place de la Concorde, and as he looked quietly through the windows, the doomed man perceived a great throng of people densely packed about a sort of square of cannon which surrounded the scaffold and guillotine. That fatal woodwork and the machine it bore stood near the entrance of the Rue Royale and a little to the east. One of the executioners (who stood at the foot of the scaffold) took the handle of the carriage door to open it. Louis stopped him and, putting one hand on the priest’s knee before he got out, said: “Sirs, I recommend you this gentleman here. [Illustration: Copyright, by Manzi-Joyant Co. A MASS UNDER THE TERROR _To face p. 214_ ] See to it that after my death no insult shall be offered him.” They said nothing in reply, but when the king would have continued, one of them cried: “Oh, yes, yes. We will see to it. Leave it to us.”