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It means that if things turn out badly for him, I am to play into his hands, and be his stalking-horse." "But there is law to be had! There is a Place de Greve for sons-in-law of that sort," cried her father; "why, I would guillotine him myself if there was no headsman to do it." "No, father, the law cannot touch him.
But his reckless character did not desert him at the scaffold. It is said that before he arrived at the Place de Greve he ate a very rich ragout, and drank a bottle of champagne, and left the world as he had gone through it. The supernumerary, the uncalled-for martyr, the last of the four devoted royal sufferers, was beheaded the following spring.
Jehan, on the Place de Greve, where, as everyone knows, the fashionable world was accustomed to meet; and while saying her paternosters to God she feasted her eyes upon all these gallants, curled, adorned, and starched, young, comely, and flitting about like true butterflies, and finished by picking out from among the lot a good gentleman, lover of the queen-mother, and a handsome Italian, with whom she was smitten because he was in the May of his age, nobly dressed, a graceful mover, brave in mien, and was all that a lover should be to bestow a heart full of love upon an honest married woman too tightly squeezed by the bonds of matrimony, which torment her, and always excite her to unharness herself from the conjugal yoke.
The indignant coachman did not dare to urge his spirited horses forward at all hazards, ruthlessly trampling down the unlucky individuals who happened to be directly in his way, as he would certainly have done in any ordinary crowd, for the canaille, that filled the Place de Greve to overflowing, was out in too great force to be trifled with so there was nothing for it but patience.
I myself shall go in disguise to-morrow to meet him in the Place de Greve, and tell him that for the present there will be no occasion for him to come to the rendezvous, as the events of the meeting which will have taken place before I see him show that there can be no doubt that the butchers are ready to go all lengths against the Orleanist party; but that if any change should occur, and private information be required, you would go to his lodging again, I shall make no allusion to his having given me none of the names save those furnished by the duke, or remark on the strangeness that, having been at the meeting, he should have heard nothing of the measures proposed against the others; his own conscience will no doubt tell him that his failure is one of the causes of my no longer desiring any messages from him.
They bore their fate with the constancy of martyrs, each protesting his innocence with his last breath, and declaring that the charges alleged against the order were false. Two days later, six more were sent to the stake at the Place de Grève. In spite of threats, the prelates went on with their grim work of terror.
The elder Mirabeau too has told how he saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for dues exacted by the tax-farmers. In 1776 two poor starving wretches were hanged on the gallows of the Place de Grève at Paris for having stolen some bread from a baker's shop.
"If there is no executioner for such crimes," he said, as he looked up at the lighted windows of the ballroom where the most enchanting women in Paris were dancing, laughing, and chatting, "I will take you by the nape of the neck, Mme la Duchesse, and make you feel something that bites more deeply than the knife in the Place de la Greve.
"My dear," her mother went on, "remember I have known Robin Greve all his life. His father, the Admiral, was a very old friend of mine. He was the very personification of honour. Robin is very fond of you ... no, he has told me nothing, but I know. Don't you think it is rather hard on an old friend to turn him away just when you most want him?"
MM. De Joyeuse had, as we have seen, left this scene, and were walking side by side in the streets generally so populous but now deserted, for every one was in the Place de Greve. Henri seemed preoccupied and sad, and Anne was unquiet on account of his brother. He was the first to speak. "Well, Henri," said he, "where are you taking me?"
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