of the sentences passed upon them (save
and except the sentence of death) until the
same were on the eve of being put into
execution. Consequently, Madame de la
Motte did not know the nature of the
sentence pronounced against her until early one
morning some three weeks afterwards, when
she was prevailed upon by a ruse to leave her
cell, and, being conducted to the registry of
the Palais de Justice, was there forced to
kneel while her sentence was read over, she
struggling and screaming with all her might.
"Overpowered by superior strength, my resistance,"
she records, "became more feeble, and
I was dragged to the place where the sacrifice
was to be completed. Weary and faint,
exhausted by my cries and the ineffectual struggles
I had already made, entreating those around me
to avenge the innocent, and the blood of their
good King Henry the Second, I at length lost all
sense of reason; I could see nothing, could feel
nothing, which could serve to show me what
they intended to do." "Madame de la Motte,"
writes at this time the Hon. Wm. Eden to Mr.
Pitt, "was called up at five, and informed that
the court wished to see her. She went in an
undress, without stays, which proved convenient.
Upon the registrar reading the
sentence, her surprise, rage, and shrieks, were
beyond description. The executioner and his
assistants instantly seized her and carried her into
an outer court, where she was fastened to a cart
with a halter round her neck. The executioner
talked to her like a tooth-drawer, and assured
her most politely that it would soon be over.
The whipping was slight and pro formâ, but
the branding was done with some severity."

Louis Blanc, in his History of the French
Revolution, quoting from contemporary memoir-
writers, the Baron de Besenval and the Abbé
Georgel, says: "Tied with cords and dragged
into the court of the Palais de Justice, she
commenced to utter cries, not of terror but of
fury. Addressing herself to the people, she
exclaimed, 'If they treat thus the blood of the
Valois, what is reserved for the blood of the
Bourbons!' And in the midst of the groans
which indignation drew from the crowd, these
characteristic words were heard: 'It is my
own fault that I suffer this ignominy; I had
only to say one word and I should have been
hung.' (She not only said this word, but
launched forth a succession of impure and
calumnious charges against the queen, couched, too,
in the foulest language.) They then placed a
gag in her mouth, and as she was struggling in
the hands of the executioner, the red-hot iron
which ought to have marked her on the shoulder
danced off and scored her on the breast."
Villette, in that almost unknown work of his
to which we have already alluded, asserts that
people were posted in the court of the palace
to make a great noise, so that none of the
public who chanced to be present might hear
what Madame de la Motte said. The sentence
executed, she was thrown half dead, into a
fiacre, and driven at full gallop to the
Salpêtrière, the prison where abandoned women
were confined, and where at this day visitors
to the female paupers now housed there have
Madame de la Motte's apartments pointed out
to them. One of the doors of the vehicle having
flown open on the road, the officers in charge
of the countess were only just in time to save
her from springing out and throwing herself
under the wheels. When she arrived at the
Salpêtrière, she made a further attempt to
destroy herself by forcing the coverlid of her
miserable truckle-bed into her mouth.

After undergoing upwards of a year's confinement
in the Salpêtrière, the countess succeeded
—it is believed with the connivance of the
authorities—in effecting her escape, and made
her way in different disguises through France
to Luxembourg, taking Bar-sur-Aube by the
way. She did not, however, dare to enter the
town, but lay concealed at night in the stone
quarries in the neighbourhood, where one or two
of her old friends came to visit her, and gave
her money to assist her on her way. Eventually
she proceeded to Ostend and crossed to
England, where she rejoined her husband, and where
the pair lived for several years on the proceeds
of certain lying memoirs, confessedly written by
the countess to extort money from the French
court. She succeeded in her object, sold the
manuscript for large sums, and then published
the memoirs from duplicates she had retained.
She was always in debt and difficulties,
eventually had her furniture swept away by an
execution, and while her husband was abroad—
trying to extort more money from the French
government—was arrested on a capias, and, in
seeking to escape from the bailiffs, dropped out
of a two-pair stairs window and severely maimed
herself. But her captors refused to surrender
up her bleeding, mangled, and almost lifeless,
body until they had security for the debt. The
wretched woman lingered for a few weeks,
tended by strangers, her husband characteristically
preferring the excitement and gaieties
of the French capital to a dying wife's bedside,
until death came to her relief, and she plotted,
lied, and was treacherous, no more.

Stitched in a cover, price Fourpence,
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MR. CHARLES DICKENS'S READINGS.
MR. CHARLES DICKENS will read at Bath on Saturday
the 9th instant; at St. James's Hall, London, on Tuesday
the 12th; at Birmingham on Wednesday the 13th, and at
Manchester on Saturday the 16th.

Now ready,
THE SIXTEENTH VOLUME.
Price 5s. 6d., bound in cloth.