You glance in, carelessly--memory rushes upon you--and the court
flows with blood, "so that men waded through it, up to the knees!" In the
tiny stone-walled room yonder, Marie Antoinette sits disdainfully composed
before her keepers; tho her face is white with the sounds she hears, as
her friends and followers are led out to swell that hideous river of
blood.
A pretty, artificial city, Paris; good for shopping, and naughty
amusements, now and then. History? Oh yes, of course; but all that's so
dry and uninspiring, and besides it happened so long ago.
Did it? In your stroll along the Rue Royale, among the jewellers' and
milliners' shops and Maxim's, glance up at the Madeleine, down at the
obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Little over a hundred years ago, this
was the brief distance between life and death for those who one minute
were dancing in the "Temple of Victory," the next were laying their heads
upon the block of the guillotine.
Notre-Dame
By Victor Hugo
[Footnote: From Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris." Translated by A.L. Alger. By
permission of Dana, Estes & Co.
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