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Rh Roland, embracing all the prisoners in her room, bade them a last farewell. To one she would say, "How now, Reboul, you weep? What weakness!" To another, "Nay, friend, am I not going to die for my country and liberty; is it not what we have always wished?"

In the dusk of the short November day, beneath the chill grey sky, the death-carts were bearing their customary load of victims to the Place de la Revolution. Sullen, half-brutalized crowds—to whom dead bodies were cast instead of bread—followed with that craving for strong sensations with which they had been accustomed to watch the racking of criminals. It was the same populace, after all, inured to ferocity through the ancient régime with its Bastile, its lettres de cachet, its brutal punishments; the same populace for whose wretched plight the youthful Manon had felt such a pathetic blending of contempt and loving pity.

All her life she had loved this people, even with the love of a mother yearning for her firstborn. All her life she had been ready to shed her blood for it, in the conviction that a new generation would arise which should live to enjoy the freedom for which she was content to perish. That conviction made her passage to the scaffold a triumphal path, and invested her, as she stood in the death cart, with a splendour as of victory. Like "a Star above the Storm" the beautiful woman, serenely radiant, in pure white raiment, with long dark locks falling in clusters to her girdle, fared through the streets of the blood-stained city, an embodiment of all that was highest and purest in the Revolution whose star was now quenched in the weltering storm. By the Quay de la Mégisserie, close