It was now two in the morning of the twenty-first. "Follow me," said the taciturn Harel to Enghien, "and summon all your courage." A few paces through the moat, a turn of a corner, and the flare of torches displayed a file of troops not far from an open grave. As the adjutant began to read the sentence, the victim faltered for a moment and exclaimed, "Oh, God! what have I done?" But immediately he regained the mastery of himself. Calmly clipping a lock of his hair, and drawing a ring from his finger, he asked that they might be sent to the Princess Charlotte. A volley--and in an instant he was dead. Savary put spurs to his horse to carry the news to Malmaison. At the gate of Paris he met the carriage of Réal, who seemed almost overpowered by what he heard in reply to his eager questions, and terrified by his own remissness. If it really were such, it must be attributed to a misunderstanding and not to lack of zeal. Bonaparte believed to the end that his victim was a guilty conspirator. For a time he had recourse to some unworthy subterfuges tending to show that the execution was the result of a blunder; but later he justified his conduct as based on reasons of state, and claimed that the act was one of self-defense. "I was assailed," he was reported to have said--"I was assailed on all hands by the enemies whom the Bourbons raised up against me. Threatened with air-guns, infernal machines, and deadly stratagems of every kind, I had no tribunal on earth to which I could appeal for protection; therefore I had a right to protect myself, and by putting to death one of those whose followers threatened my life I was entitled to strike a salutary terror into others." When on his death-bed, his maladroit attendant read from an English review a bitter arraignment of him as guilty of the duke's murder. The dying man rose, and, catching up his will, wrote in his own hand: "I had the Duc d'Enghien seized and tried because it was necessary to the safety, the interest, and the honor of the French people, when by his own confession the Comte d'Artois was supporting sixty assassins in Paris. Under similar circumstances I would again do likewise." Nevertheless he occasionally endeavored to unload the entire responsibility on Talleyrand. To Lord Ebrington, to O'Meara, to Las Cases, to Montholon, he asseverated that Talleyrand had checked his impulses to clemency.