Kingston High School 1965 Yearbook (Kingston, NY) - Full Access

September 28, 1789 I have no fears, but I am sure this will be no easy ordeal. Each candidate is to be taken to an entrance to a secret passageway beneath the streets of Paris-the sewers. We are to be given nine nails apiece -one for each month of the year of Revolution. We are also to re– ceive nine matches, which will be of little use in those damp and de– pressingly dark sewers, and a mallet. We will enter the tunnel and proceed through the labyrinth until we find a coffin-yes, an ordinary burial casket-with the words "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" scrawled on it. We are then to drive the nine nails into the coffin and return to the starting point. You may wonder why there were coffins in our sewers. In the dis– order of the Revolution there was no time to prepare the bodies of slain aristocrats for burial, nor was there time for ceremony. Several peasant sympathizers of the privileged orders hid the bodies in make– shift coffins and secured them in the sewers until after the Revolution when there would be time for the proper ceremonies. If you should not understand why ·such a mission should strike a little terror into even the boldest of youthful hearts, you must realize that refugees, conspirators, and members of other fraternities prowled in the silent seclusion of the sewers. September 30, 1789 In concluding my fiance's "journal" it saddens me to tell you that his noble twenty-nine-year-old spirit failed the test which would have meant his life or death. I myself was a member of his "fraternity." A report was made at our next meeting, and I was told of his fate. Every move made by my beloved Jacques was relayed back to those at the mouth of the tunnel by the echoes of the sounds. They heard him curse a few times, which probably meant that he dropped his matches. After a short while they heard the sound of his hammer– ing. An instant after the hammering stopped they heard a scream and a not-so-dull thud. They rushed into the cave as his screams still echoed under the city of Paris. They had torches, of course, and ascertained in an instant the cause of death-severe mental shock and anxiety. He half-lay, half-stood, as he dangled from the ninth nail-the one he had hammered through his cape. Alan Finger 155