Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/55

 40 her to her cell, there to await the hour of execution. In one of the letters of Madame de Sevigne, is contained a graphic but flippant narrative of the last moments of the ill-fated Marchioness de Brinvilliers. In it she says :

she was taken naked in a chemise, and a rope about her neck, to Notre-Dame, to make the amende honorable, and then thrust into the cart, where I saw her thrown backward upon the straw, a doc tor on one side of her and the executioner on the other. Really, that made me shudder. Those who saw the execution say that she mounted the scaf fold with courage. . . . She died as she lived; that is to say, resolutely."

"At last it is done. La Brinvilliers is no more : after the execution her poor little body was thrown into a great fire, and her ashes scattered to the I It is almost incredible; but we are told winds, so that we shall now breathe her. . . . She was condemned yesterday. In the morning her that this atrocious criminal was a popular sentence was read to her; she underwent the tor, favorite, and that on the day after her execu ture; she said there was no necessity for it, that tion a mob assembled in the Place de Greve, she would tell all. In fact, for four hours she re and demanded, with loud cries, the ashes of lated the story of her life, which was more fright the saint who had been sacrificed the even ful than had been imagined. ... At six o'clock ing before.