“In an instant all attention was turned from the platform to the scene below it, where, with shouts and screams of fury, the terrible mob yelled aloud for blood. In vain the guards endeavored to keep back the people, who twice rescued their victim from the hands of the soldiery; and already a confused murmur arose that the commissary himself was a traitor to the public, and favored the tyrants, when a dull, clanking sound rose above the tumult, and a cheer of triumph proclaimed the approach of the instrument of torture. “In their impetuous torrent of vengeance they had dragged the guillotine from the distant end of the 'Place,' where it usually stood; and there now still knelt the figure of a condemned man, lashed with his arms behind him, on the platform, awaiting the moment of his doom. Oh, that terrible face, whereon death had already set its seal! With glazed, lack-lustre eye, and cheek leaden and quivering, he gazed around on the fiendish countenances like one awakening from a dream, his lips parted as though to speak; but no sound came forth. “'Place! place for Monsieur le Marquis!' shouted a ruffian, as he assisted to raise the figure of the blind man up the steps; and a ribald yell of fiendish laughter followed the brutal jest. “'Thou art to make thy journey in most noble company,' said another to the culprit on the platform. “'An he see not his way in the next world better than in this, thou must lend him a hand, friend,' said a third. And with many a ruffian joke they taunted their victims, who stood on the last threshold of life. “Among the crowd upon the scaffold of the guillotine I could see the figure of the blind man as it leaned and fell on either side, as the movement of the mob bore it. “'_Parbleu!_ these Royalists would rather kneel than stand,” said a voice, as they in vain essayed to make the old man place his feet under him; and ere the laughter which this rude jest excited ceased, a cry broke forth of--'He is dead! he is dead!' And with a heavy sumph, the body fell from their hands; for when their power of cruelty ended, they cared not for the corpse. “It was true: life was extinct, none knew how,--whether from the violence of the mob in its first outbreak, or that a long-suffering heart had burst at last; but the chord was snapped, and he whose proud soul lately defied the countless thousands around, now slept with the dead. “In a few seconds it seemed as though they felt that a power stronger than their own had interposed between them and their vengeance, and they stood almost aghast before the corpse, where no trace of blood proclaimed it to be their own; then, rallying from this stupor, with one voice they demanded that the son should atone for the crimes of the father. “'I am ready,' cried the youth, in a voice above the tumult. 'I did not deem I could be grateful to ye for aught, but I am for this.'