. . . "Beat high, heart; hasten, feet; we are going to Susette!"
5. Inferno
When Susette fell she tried to summon strength to scream. With almost superhuman effort she sought to cry out, at least to groan, to twitch a toe or bend a finger—to do anything to make them realize she was still alive. The thought of being strapped down to the chopper's plank, to have to look into the blood-stained basket waiting for her head, had been a constant nightmare, but the chopper would be preferable to this. To be nailed in a coffin, carted to the cemetery, buried while alive—to smother slowly, horribly . . .
"Misère de Dieu," she heard a guardsman swear, "will he never come, that one? Me, I am no croque-mort—no damned watcher of the dead "
The clop-clop of a horse's hooves against the flints sounded. "Holà, mes enfants, you have a fare for old Jacques-Corbillard, yes?" a voice hailed through the gloom. "Bon. Help me with this sacré coffin. The devil take those carpenters, they make them heavier each day!"
The rough pine box thumped hollowly upon the pavement; she felt herself heaved into it, heard the grate of wood on wood as the cover was laid on, heard the bang of hammer against nail and felt the jarring impact as they fastened down the lid. They shoved the coffin in the cart. A whip cracked. . . .
Often she had wondered how the wretches in the tumbril felt as they were hurried to the guillotine. Now she knew if they could have compared her fate with theirs they would have sung for joy. Theirs was a mercifully swift end: a stroke, a shock, and all was done. She was being taken to a slow and awful death by suffocation in the grave.
The minutes had seemed endless as she lay bereft of sight and movement on the pavement. Now it seemed the shambling cart-horse had the wings of Pegasus as it ambled slowly toward the cemetery.
They had halted. She felt the shock as they dragged her from the cart and dropped her on the muddy earth. Her feet were higher than her head as the driver and a helper manhandled the coffin. Another jarring thump and she had come to rest; then a report deafening as the bursting of a bombshell sounded just above her heart and the confined air inside the coffin beat against her ear-drums with the shock of it. A second detonation on the lid above her face, a third, a fourth, a perfect avalanche of shocks as clod on roaring clod came rattling down by shovelfuls upon the coffin top.
Her ears were paralyzed by the continuous battering of the falling earth; she could feel the constantly-increasing weight of it upon her breast, her mouth, her nostrils. She made a last supreme effort to rouse and scream for help; then a great flare, bright as blazing lightning, burst against her eyes, and the last shred of sensation left her.
Slowly consciousness returned. How good it was to lie here in her bed, to know the terrible experience had been a nightmare! She had not been seized by Henriot, not taken up for dead, not dropped unceremoniously in a grave. Presently, when she had had a chance to soothe her shaken nerves, she'd call Marjotte and have her make a cup of chocolate; then she'd rest until the morning came.
But how dark it was! The curtains had been drawn to keep the deadly
