The blow had fallen at last, suddenly, and with crushing force.  When “Louis Hercule Timoleon de Cosse-Brissac, soldier from his birth,” was charged before the National High Court with admitting Royalists into the Guards, he answered:  “I have admitted into the King’s Guards no one but citizens who fulfilled all the conditions contained in the decree of formation”:  and no other answer or plea would he deign to his accusers.

From his Orleans prison, where he now awaited the inevitable end, he wrote daily to his beloved lady; and every day brought him a tender and cheering letter from her.  On 11th August, 1792, he writes:  “I received this morning the best letter I have had for a long time past; none have rejoiced my heart so much.  Thank you for it.  I kiss you a thousand times.  You indeed will have my last thought.  Ah, my darling, why am I not with you in a wilderness rather than in Orleans?”

A few days later news reached Madame du Barry that her lover, with other prisoners, was to be brought from Orleans to Paris.  He would thus actually pass her own door; she would at least see him once again, under however tragic conditions.  With what leaden steps the intervening hours crawled by!  Each sound set her heart beating furiously as if it would choke her.  Each moment was an agony of anticipation.  At last she hears the sound of coming feet.  She flies to the window, piercing the dark night with straining eyes.  The sound grows nearer, a tumult of trampling feet and hoarse cries.  A mob of dark figures surges through her gates, pours riotously up the steps and through the open door.  In the hall there is a pandemonium of cries and oaths; the door of her room is burst open, and something is flung at her feet.  She glances down; and, with a gasp of unspeakable horror, looks down on the severed head of her lover, red with his blood.

The sans-culottes had indeed taken a terrible revenge.  They had fallen in overwhelming numbers on the prisoners and their escort; the soldiers had fled; and de Brissac found himself the centre of a mob, the helpless target of a hundred murderous blows.  With a knife for sole weapon he fought valiantly, like the brave soldier he was, until a cowardly blow from behind felled him to the ground.  “Fire at me with your pistols,” he shouted, “your work will the sooner be over.”  A few moments later he drew his last gallant breath, almost within sight of the house that sheltered his beloved.

* * * * *

United in life, the lovers were not long to be divided.  “Since that awful day,” Madame du Barry wrote to a friend, “you can easily imagine what my grief has been.  They have consummated the frightful crime, the cause of my misery and my eternal regrets—­my grief is complete—­a life which ought to have been so grand and glorious!  Good God, what an end!”

Thus cruelly deprived of all that made life worth living, she cared little how soon the end came.  “I ask nothing now of life,” she wrote, “but that it should quickly give me back to him.”  And her prayer was soon to be granted.  A few months after that night of horrors she herself was awaiting the guillotine in her cell at the conciergerie.