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Perhaps the gaoler, whose brutal carelessness terminated the days of Condorcet, extinguished his own humanity in the torrent of that revolution of which Condorcet himself was one of the authors; and perhaps the death of a sovereign, whom Condorcet assisted in bringing to the scaffold, might have been this man's first lesson in cruelty, and have taught him to set little value on the lives of the rest of mankind.
A second had followed the first, and a third and fourth, until the flimsy scaffold had gone down under their weight and movement. His eyes were hard and savage for a moment as he contemplated the extent of the calamity; then the old look of patience returned into them, and he began to gather together the bones well picked and gnawed.
The historian, led away by the movement of the events which he retraces, should pause in the presence of this serious and touching figure, as passengers stopped to contemplate her sublime features and white dress on the tumbril which conveyed thousands of victims to death. To understand her we must trace her career from the atelier of her father to the scaffold.
At that moment Arthur Dimmesdale stood on the proudest eminence to which a New England clergyman could be exalted. The minister, surrounded by the leading men of the town, halted at the scaffold, and, turning towards it, cried, "Hester, come hither! Come, my little Pearl!" Leaning on Hester's shoulder, the minister, with the child's hand in his, slowly ascended the scaffold steps.
To the hunting-page's question as to what induced him to make such an extraordinary refusal when he was offered in exchange nothing less than life and liberty, Kohlhaas answered, "Noble Sir, if your sovereign should come to me and say, 'Myself and the whole company of those who help me wield my sceptre I will destroy destroy, you understand, which is, I admit, the dearest wish that my soul cherishes, I should nevertheless still refuse to give him the paper which is worth more to him than life, and should say to him, 'You have the authority to send me to the scaffold, but I can cause you pain, and I intend to do so!" And with these words Kohlhaas, with death staring him in the face, called a trooper to him and told him to take a nice bit of food which had been left in the dish.
At that moment the Earl of Gloucester entered, and to this true friend Wallace expressed his wish that he and Helen should be united by the sacred rites of the church. Gloucester retired, and returned with a priest; the pair were joined as man and wife. Two days later Wallace stood on the scaffold. The executioner approached to throw the rope over the neck of his victim.
Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But as he came down the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognised as his own. "It was found," said the Sexton, "this morning on the scaffold where evil-doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence.
If there were in the Constituent Assembly more statesmen than philosophers, it must have perceived that an intermediate state was impossible, under the guardianship of a half-dethroned king. We do not confide to the vanquished the care and management of the conquests. To act as she acts, was to drive the king, without redemption, to treason or the scaffold.
In other words, he is at war with every person in the world except his son, the boy who told you such pretty fairy stories last night. If he is ever retaken and sent back to the penitentiary, he will never open his lips, not even if the accused son dies on the scaffold." "And that's another beautiful little complication!" exclaimed Sandy.
But nothing would have induced him to abandon it, so long as he could possibly maintain himself there, no matter at what cost of discomfort, or even actual distress, for from it he had a capital view of the scaffold, and all its horribly fascinating details the wheel upon which the criminal was to revolve, the coil of rope to bind him to it, and the heavy bar to break his bones.
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