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AVE LIBERTAS MORITURI TE SALUTANT!
Five death carts bore the doomed ones along; among them Valazé, whom no further wrong could touch. Bare-headed, with bound hands, and in their shirt-sleeves, they yet looked like conquerors as, dragged through the streets of Paris, they chanted the Marseillaise. The Vive la République of the crowd they met with answering shouts of Vive la République. Then—as one by one they ascended the scaffold, as one by one their heads fell severed by the swift stroke of its knife—their chorus grew fainter and fainter, till at last one voice only remained singing:
Contre nous de la tyrannie
Le couteau sanglant est levé.
Then it too stopped—hushed in death was that singing!
When the Girondins left the Conciergerie their heroine entered it. It was the last milestone on the road of the Revolution. Only a fortnight before Marie Jeanne Roland entered its precincts Marie-Antoinette had quitted them for the scaffold; so that the woman who hated the Republic most bitterly was condemned almost simultaneously with that other woman who had the most adored it. But such was the turbid confusion
