He had plenty of time to note all these things, for they had stopped the march to execution a moment and had made him sit down in the open courtyard on an old box.  A few steps away from him under the shed where he certainly was going to be hanged, a man got upon a stool (the stool that would serve Rouletabille a few moments later) with his arm raised, and drove with a few blows of a mallet a great ring-bolt into a beam above his head.

The reporter’s eyes, which had not lost their habit of taking everything in, rested again on a coarse canvas sack that lay on the ground.  The young man felt a slight tremor, for he saw quickly that the sack swathed a human form.  He turned his head away, but only to confront another empty sack that was intended for him.  Then he closed his eyes.  The sound of music came from somewhere outside, notes of the balalaika.  He said to himself, “Well, we certainly are in Finland”; for he knew that, if the guzla is Russian the balalaika certainly is Finnish.  It is a kind of accordeon that the peasants pick plaintively in the doorways of their toubas.  He had seen and heard them the afternoon that he went to Pergalovo, and also a little further away, on the Viborg line.  He pictured to himself the ruined structure where he now found himself shut in with the revolutionary tribunal, as it must appear from the outside to passers-by; unsinister, like many others near it, sheltering under its decaying roof a few homes of humble workers, resting now as they played the balalaika at their thresholds, with the day’s labor over.

And suddenly from the ineffable peace of his last evening, while the balalaika mourned and the man overhead tested the solidity of his ring-bolt, a voice outside, the grave, deep voice of Annouchka, sang for the little Frenchman: 

    “For whom weave we now the crown
     Of lilac, rose and thyme? 
     When my hand falls lingering down
     Who then will bring your crown
     Of lilac, rose and thyme?

     O that someone among you would hear,
     And come, and my lonely hand
     Would press, and shed the friendly tear —
     For alone at the end I stand.

     Who now will bring the crown
     Of lilac, rose and thyme?”

Rouletabille listened to the voice dying away with the last sob of the balalaika.  “It is too sad,” he said, rising.  “Let us go,” and he wavered a little.

They came to search him.  All was ready above.  They pushed him gently towards the shed.  When he was under the ring-bolt, near the stool, they made him turn round and they read him something in Russian, doubtless less for him than for those there who did not understand French.  Rouletabille had hard work to hold himself erect.

The gentleman of the Neva said to him further: 

“Monsieur, we now read you the final formula.  It asks you to say whether, before you die, you have anything you wish to add to what we know concerning the sentence which has been passed upon you.”