Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/50

hungry machine of death? She bent reverently to the statue of Liberty which with strange mockery was set up near the guillotine; uttered her world-famed apostrophe to it, “O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!” spoke a few cheering words to the old man, La Marche, who shared her fate; begged the executioner to spare those aged eyes the horror of witnessing her death; asked, as her face grew eloquent with the sublime thoughts which this supreme hour of her life evoked, for pen and paper to which to commit them —asked only to be brutally refused. With unfaltering step, unblanched face, and serene eyes, she stepped upon the scaffold, and stepped a moment later into the unknowable, and, through that cruel death, into at least an earthly immortality. So perished, at the age of thirty-nine, one of the purest, if not the purest character evoked by the French Revolution. Much as I revere the character of the man Jesus, I doubt whether his death was more sublime than was hers.