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first; the duchesse d’Ayen was tenth— quickly, like all the others. Death was precise and mechanical: three executioner’s assistants seized the duchesse by the arms, while others strapped her upright against a hinged vertical plank, face forward, ripped the clothing off the back of her neck, and stepped back quickly to avoid the splatter of blood.
    The huge crowd of onlookers fell silent.
    Thud; thud; thud
. The sounds resounded across the square.
    Thud:
the hinged plank with its body slammed to the horizontal, positioning the victim’s neck beneath the blade.
    Thud:
the neckpiece dropped and pinned the head firmly in place.
    Thud:
the blade struck home, and the head fell softly into the basket beneath a spray of blood as the crowd roared its approval.
    The assistants moved swiftly, releasing the corpse and dropping it into a cart at the base of the scaffold, where street peddlers pounced like hyenas to its side and stripped off shoes and other salable items of clothing with professional efficiency and speed. After holding high the severed head by its hair to display it to the cheering crowd, the executioner tossed it into the cart and turned to clean the blade of his instrument.
    By the end of July, Robespierre’s paranoia reached proportions that grew intolerable for even his most loyal supporters. After accusing his own Jacobin clubs of plotting against him, he demanded the immediate arrest and execution of the entire Convention—every member. It was one demand too many. By then the number of widows and orphans had reached staggering proportions; the very women who had marched to Versailles to demand the king’s head on a pike, and the Jacobins who had led them, turned against Robespierre. Tens of thousands of suspects came out of hiding to join them. As the mob outside cried
“A bas Robespierre!”
Convention delegates summoned up the courage to defy him and demand that he name those he suspected of treason; he refused, and the following day the once-timid Convention staged a coup, abolishing his Committee of Public Safety and ordering his arrest and that of his terrorist confederates. That evening, July 23, 1794, a pistol shotblew off half his jaw; some said he had attempted suicide, but a guard claimed he had shot Robespierre trying to escape. The source of the shot was immaterial. With his head swathed in blood-soaked bandages, Robespierre lay in agony for but one night; the guillotine put him out of his misery the following day, with nineteen of his closest political allies, including his brother. While a mob watched in silent disbelief, seventy-one more Robespierristes followed him to the same fate the following day in a bloody finale to the Terror. The final toll would remain unmatched in the civilized world until the twentieth century. In only two years, the French sent one million of their own men, women, and children to prison. In a nation of twenty-six million, about two hundred thousand are
known
to have died; untold thousands of others—many of them simply nameless, homeless, jobless peasants and workers—were killed summarily without knowing why and dumped into mass graves. Ironically, the “popular” revolution claimed far more commoners than aristocrats: 28 percent of the dead were peasants and 31 percent were craftsmen. Only 2 percent were clergymen. The guillotine alone killed nearly seventeen thousand; police and soldiers killed the others, often in counterrevolutionary uprisings in the provinces.
    “You must give thanks to God, who has saved my life,” Adrienne wrote to console her children after learning that the guillotine had claimed her mother, sister, and grandmother.
    After Robespierre’s death, moderates moved into seats of power, and, during the ensuing months, they outlawed Jacobin clubs, abolished vigilance committees, restored economic and commercial freedom, and released several hundred thousand imprisoned “suspects” from prison, including General Rochambeau and other