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To spare her no humiliation Ferey pinned them up; he then made her sit on a stool and tied her to the post, which forced her to hold up her head. What she saw at the foot of the scaffold brought tears of pride to her eyes.
Ducolombier, coming from Chauveau-Lagarde, asked to see her at the wicket. She went down without suspicion and was astonished to find in place of the man she expected, two others whom she had never seen. One was the executioner Ferey, who seized her hands and tied her. The doors opened, and seeing the gendarmes, the cart and the crowd, she understood, and bowed her head in resignation.
The cortège went by the "Gros-Horloge" to the "Vieux-Marché." Some one who saw Mme. Acquet pass, seated in the cart beside the executioner Ferey, says that "her white dress and short black hair blowing in her face made the paleness of her skin conspicuous; she was neither downcast nor bold; the sentence was cried aloud beside the cart." She died calmly, as she had lived for months.
The nine condemned men were taken to the conciergerie. It was night when their "toilet" was begun. The high-executioner, Charles-André Ferey, of an old Norman family of executioners, had called on his cousins Joanne and Desmarets to help him, and while the scaffold was being hastily erected on the Place du Vieux-Marché, they made preparations in the prison.
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