It was now six o'clock in the morning, and the gray light of the dawn was mingled with the gleam of torches.

The prince refused to have his eyes bandaged--the word was given, and he fell.

The body, dressed as it was, was immediately thrown into a grave--which had been prepared beforehand; at least, so say all the witnesses, except M.Savary.
To resume our notice of the mere informalities of the procedure:--1.

The sentence was altogether unsupported by the evidence, except as to the mere fact of D'Enghien's having borne arms against France; but this could be no crime in him: he owed no allegiance to the French government; on the contrary, he and all his family had been expressly excepted from every act of amnesty to emigrants, and thereby constituted _aliens_.2.The execution took place immediately after the sentence was pronounced; this is contrary to the laws of all civilised nations, and in direct contradiction to an article in the French code then in force, which gave twenty-four hours to every prisoner convicted by a court-martial, that he might, if he chose, appeal from their sentence.
But, 3rdly, the publications (long afterwards extorted) of Savary and Hullin, prove that the court, perplexed with the difficulty of making their sentence appear to have any conformity with the charge and the evidence, drew up in fact, two different _sentences_: one before the duke was executed, which bore the article, "immediate execution"; the other a more careful document, intended alone to meet the public eye, in which not a word about immediate execution occurs.

The duke was _not_ executed, therefore, at six in the morning of the 21st of March, upon that sentence which was made public at the time, as the authority for his death.
Every circumstance in the dismal tale, from the quantity of linen packed up at Strasburg, to the preparation of the grave in the ditch of Vincennes, attests the fact that the fate of the unfortunate young man (for he was but 32 years old when he fell) had been determined on, to the minutest particular, long before he was summoned to a mock trial, before an incompetent tribunal.