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Updated: May 13, 2025
"What is that?" he inquired. The gaoler, on whose dirty face some measure of surprise was manifested, approached the little grating that overlooked the yard and peered out. "Sacrenom!" he swore. "The tumbrils are moving. They have left you behind, Citizen." But La Boulaye gathered no encouragement, such as the gaoler thought he might, from that contingency.
Louise, guided by her faithful attendant Pierre, had left the courtroom directly after the condemnation. Leaning heavily upon him, the blind girl had staggered out, or pressed by the awful knowledge that her sister Henriette was doomed to die. "Oh, take me to her!" she had cried. There was only one thing to do: to follow the route of the death tumbrils, in the slight hope of overtaking her.
Not wholly levelled are the old yellow walls; the railway-station with its one eye, and clock that never sleeps, opens its jaws with a cheerful bright light, like an inn fire; dark figures in cowls, soldiers, sailors, flit about; curiously-shaped tumbrils for the baggage lie up in ordinary.
Alas, alas! a myth, founded, like the world itself, on Nothing! Of massacring, altar-robbing, Hébertism, is there beginning to be a sickening? Danton, Camille Desmoulins are weary of it; the Hébertists themselves are smitten; nineteen of them travel their last road in the tumbrils.
Thiers, putting his senile fingers in the porridge, stirred a ferment that had not even germinated since the guillotine towered in the Place de la Concorde and the tumbrils rattled through the streets. He did not know what he was stirring. The same impulse that possessed Gladstone to devastate trees animated Thiers. He stirred the dangerous mess because he liked to stir, nothing more.
At one time these tumbrils contained royal ladies and gentlemen, ci-devant dukes and princesses, aristocrats from every county in France, but now this stock was becoming exhausted. The wretched Queen Marie Antoinette still lingered in the Temple with her son and daughter.
Send other women up and down to seek her, lingering somewhere; and yet, although the messengers have done dread deeds, it is questionable whether of their own wills they will go far enough to find her! "Bad Fortune!" cries The Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair, "and here are the tumbrils! And Evremonde will be despatched in a wink, and she not here!
There is no doubt about it, if Julia had got to receive a death sentence she would have liked it to be well given; it is quite possible, had she lived at the time, she would have been one of those who objected to the indignity of riding in the tumbrils quite as much as to the guillotine at the end of the ride.
Danger had become second nature; the very rumbling of the tumbrils passing his house on the way to the guillotine had ceased to be anything but annoying; until to-day, to avoid the interruption, he had left his house in the Rue St. Honoré and established himself in this empty flat in the little Rue Favart. By-and-by he laid down the book he was reading and fell into deep meditation.
Half a century later we find sturdy barons setting up their tumbrils and gallows. In the reign of Edward I. there were still thirty-five private gallows in Berkshire alone, and when one of them was by chance or age broken down, and the people refused to set it up again, the baron could still make shift with the nearest oak.
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