lifted up her blood-smeared face, and warmly thanked the guard for not killing her, "thereby depriving her of her share in her community's glorious witness for Jesus Christ". Sister Mary-Henrietta stood by her prioress until it was her turn to die, helping the 14 other sisters climb the scaffold steps before climbing them herself, and was the second-to-last to die. Mother Teresa died last. There are no surviving relics of the Martyrs of Compiègne because their heads and bodies were buried, along with 128 other victims executed that day, in a deep, 30-feet square sand-pit in the Picpus Cemetery. Their burial site, located in the back of the cemetery, is marked with two large, gravel-covered quadrangles. The heads and torsos of the 1,306 people who were guillotined at the Place de la Nation between 13 June and 27 July 1794 are buried there. Their names, including the 16 Martyrs of Compiègne as well as Mulot de la Ménardière, are inscribed on marble plaques covering the walls of a nearby church, where prayer is offered continuously. 24 other victims died with the sisters the day they were killed. Legacy Ten days after the Martyrs of Compiègne were executed, Maximilien Robespierre was executed himself, ending the Reign of Terror. French Catholics of the time believed that the public executions of the nuns "helped bring about the end to the horrors of the revolution" and hastened the end of the Reign of Terror. Three of the sisters were away from the community at the time of the arrests and so were not executed along with the others. One of these, Marie de l'Incarnation (Françoise Geneviève Philippe), later wrote an account of the execution, History of the Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, which was published in 1836. The story of the Martyrs of Compiègne has inspired a novella, an unproduced film, a play, and an opera. In 1931, German writer Gertrude von le Fort, a student of Ernst Troeltsch and a convert to Catholicism, drew on the History to write a novella, The Song at the Scaffold, told from the viewpoint of the fictional character Blanche de la Force, "a young aristocrat haunted by fear, who seeks peace in the convent". French Dominican Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger and cinematographer Phillippe Agostini developed a film based on the novella, and in 1947, they persuaded Georges Bernanos to write the dialogue. The film was never produced, but the text