Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/202

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182
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

because if captured they would hang him. He would have done better to run the risk, for he was guillotined on the 6th June 1794.

Pierre O'Brennan, a priest manifestly of Irish extraction, was executed on the 23rd July 1794, for having spoken against the authorities and concealed some old title-deeds; and the last batch of Terrorist victims included two Moncriefs, father and son, of remote Scotch extraction. There is no foundation for the story of the St. Antoine mob stopping the tumbrels on the way to the scaffold, and of Henriot forcing the drivers to proceed. The batch of the 9th Thermidor had been sacrificed before tidings of Robespierre's overthrow could have reached the Faubourg St. Antoine.

Most of these English victims were interred in a garden adjoining Pare Monceau, which for the last six weeks of the Terror was the political cemetery. Robespierre himself found a resting-place there, if indeed it could be called a resting-place, for the bodies were stripped, thrown into a trench, and covered with quicklime. The garden belonged to a house called the "Maison du Christ," and it was styled the "Enclos du Christ," because a Calvary had formerly stood close by. After Waterloo the garden was offered for sale to the Crown, for Princess Elizabeth had been buried in it; but Louis XVIII., who was sceptical even as to the remains of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, found