The stain of blood is still on
the paper where Robespierre's head fell. They shot Couthon in the leg,
they threw Henriot out of the window into a cesspool below where he
wallowed all night, while Le Bas blew out his brains. The next day they
brought Robespierre to the Convention, but the Convention refused to
receive him. They threw him on a table, where he lay, horrible to be
seen, his coat torn down the back, his stockings falling over his heels,
his shirt open and soaking with blood, speechless, for his mouth was
filled with splinters of his broken jaw. Such was the man who the
morning before had been Dictator, and master of all the armies of
France. Couthon was in little better plight. Twenty-one in all were
condemned on the 10 Thermidor and taken in carts to the guillotine. An
awful spectacle. There was Robespierre with his disfigured face, half
dead, and Fleuriot, and Saint-Just, and Henriot next to Robespierre, his
forehead gashed, his right eye hanging down his cheek, dripping with
blood, and drenched with the filth of the sewer in which he had passed
the night. Under their feet lay the cripple Couthon, who had been thrown
in like a sack.
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