A voice cried out from the opposite barricade, “Advance in order!”

Then they saw him slowly descend the dimly-lighted crest of the barricade, paving-stone by paving-stone, and plunge with head erect into the dark street.

From the barricade all eyes followed him with an inexpressible anxiety. 
Hearts ceased beating, mouths no longer breathed.

No one attempted to restrain Denis Dussoubs.  Each felt that he was going where he ought to go.  Charpentier wished to accompany him.  “Would you like me to go with you?” he cried out to him.  Dussoubs refused, with a shake of the head.

Dussoubs, alone and grave, advanced towards the Mauconseil Barricade.  The night was so dark that they lost sight of him immediately.  They could distinguish only for a few seconds his peaceable and intrepid bearing.  Then he disappeared.  They could no longer see anything.  It was an inauspicious moment.  The night was dark and dumb.  There could only be heard in this thick darkness the sound of a measured and firm step dying away in the distance.

After some time, how long no one could reckon, so completely did emotion eclipse thought amongst the witnesses of this marvellous scene, a glimmer of light appeared in the barricade of the soldiers; it was probably a lantern which was being brought or taken away.  By the flash they again saw Dussoubs, he was close to the barricade, he had almost reached it, he was walking towards it with his arms stretched out like Christ.

Suddenly the word of command, “Fire!” was heard.

A fusillade burst forth.

They had fired upon Dussoubs when he was at the muzzles of their guns.

Dussoubs fell.

Then he raised himself and cried, “Long live the Republic!”

Another bullet struck him, he fell again.  Then they saw him raise himself once more, and heard him shout in a loud voice, “I die with the Republic.”

These were his last words.

In this manner died Denis Dussoubs.

It was not vainly that he had said to his brother, “Your sash will be there.”

He was anxious that this sash should do its duty.  He determined in the depths of his great soul that this sash should triumph either through the law or through death.

That is to say, in the first case it would save Right, in the second save Honor.

Dying, he could say, “I have succeeded.”

Of the two possible triumphs of which he had dreamed, the gloomy triumph was not the less splendid.

The insurgent of the Elysee thought that he had killed a Representative of the People, and boasted of it.  The sole journal published by the coup d’etat under these different titles Patrie, Univers, Moniteur, Parisien, etc., announced on the next day, Friday, the 5th, “that the ex-Representative Dussoubs (Gaston) had been killed at the barricade of the Rue Neuve Saint Eustache, and that he bore ’a red flag in his hand.’”