“Hi there! Mahiet Baliffre! will they hang her here?”

“Simpleton, this is the penance in her shift— the Almighty is going to cough a little Latin in her face! That is always done here at noon. If ’tis the gallows you want, you must go to the Grève.”

“I’ll go there afterward.”

“Tell me, La Boucanbry, is it true that she refused to have a confessor?”

“So they say, La Bechaigne.”

“Did you ever see such a heathen?”

“Sir, ’tis the custom here. The justiciary of the Palais is bound to deliver up the malefactor, ready sentenced for execution— if a layman, to the Provost of Paris; if a cleric, to the official court of the bishopric.”

“Sir, I thank you.”

“Oh, mon Dieu!” said Fleur-de-Lys, “the poor creature!”

And this thought tinged with sadness the look she cast over the crowd. The captain, much more interested in her than in this dirty rabble, had laid an amorous hand upon her waist. She turned round with a smile half of pleasure, half of entreaty.

“Prithee, Phœbus, let be! If my mother entered and saw your hand— ”

At this moment the hour of noon boomed slowly from the great clock of Notre-Dame. A murmur of satisfaction burst from the crowd. The last vibration of the twelfth stroke had hardly died away before all the heads were set in one direction, like waves before a sudden gust of wind, and a great shout went up from the square, the windows, the roofs: “Here she comes!”

Fleur-de-Lys clasped her hands over her eyes that she might not see.

“Sweetheart,” Phœbus hastened to say, “shall we go in?”

“No,” she returned, and the eyes that she had just closed from fear she opened again from curiosity.

A tumbrel drawn by a strong Normandy draught-horse, and closely surrounded by horsemen in violet livery with white crosses, had just entered the Place from the Rue Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs. The sergeants of the watch opened a way for it through the people by vigorous use of their thonged scourges. Beside the tumbrel rode a few officers of justice and the police, distinguishable by their black garments and their awkwardness in the saddle. Maître Jacques Charmolue figured at their head.

In the fatal cart a girl was seated, her hands tied behind her, but no priest by her side. She was in her shift, and her long black hair (it was the custom then not to cut it till reaching the foot of the gibbet) fell unbound about her neck and over her half-naked shoulders.

Through these waving locks— more lustrous than the raven’s wing— you caught a glimpse of a great rough brown rope, writhing and twisting, chafing the girl’s delicate shoulder-blades, and coiled about her fragile neck like an earthworm round a flower. Below this rope glittered a small amulet adorned with green glass, which, doubtless, she had been allowed to retain, because nothing is refused to those about to die. The spectators raised above her at the windows could see her bare legs as she sat in the tumbrel, and which she strove to conceal as if from a last remaining instinct of her sex. At her feet lay a little goat, also strictly bound. The criminal was holding her ill-fastened shift together with her teeth. It looked as though, despite her extreme misery, she was still conscious of the indignity of being thus