THE TRAGEDY OF THE TEMPLE.
History is like a prison-house, of which Time is the only jailer who can reveal the secrets. And Father Time is slow to speak. Sometimes he is strangely dumb concerning events of deep importance, sometimes idly garrulous about small matters. When now and then he reveals some long-kept secret, we refuse to believe him; we cannot credit that such things ever happened on this planet of ours, so respectable in its civilized humanity, so tenderly zealous for the welfare and freedom of its remotest members. But this same humanity is a riddle to which our proudest philosophers have not yet found the clew. It moves mountains to deliver an oppressed mouse, and sits mute and apathetic while a nation of weak brothers is being hunted to death by a nation of strong ones in the midst of its universal brotherhood; seeing the most sacred principles and highest interests of the world attacked and imperilled, and the earth shaken with throes and rendings that will bring forth either life or death, exactly as humanity shall decide, and yet not moving a finger either way. Then, when the storm is over and it beholds the wreck caused by its own apathy or stupidity, it fills the world with an “agony of lamentation,” gnashes its teeth, and protests that it slept, and knew not that these things were being done in its name.
Sometimes the funeral knell of the victims goes on echoing like a distant thunder-tone for a whole generation, and is scarcely heeded, until at last some watcher hearkens, and wakes us up, and, lo! we find that a tragedy has been enacted at our door, and the victim has been crying out piteously for help while we slumbered. History is full of these slumberings and awakenings. What an awakening for France was that when, after the lapse of two generations, the jailer struck the broken stones of the Temple, and gave them a voice to tell their story, bidding all the world attend!
The account of the imprisonment and death of Louis XVII. had hitherto come down to his people stripped of much of its true character, and clothed with a mistiness that disguised the naked horror of the truth, and flattered the sensitive vanity of the nation into the belief—or at any rate into the plausible hope—that much had been exaggerated, and that the historians of those times had used too strong colors in portraying the sufferings of the son of their murdered king. The Grande Nation had been always grand; she had had her hour of delirium, and run wild in anarchy and chaos while it lasted; but she had never disowned her essential greatness, never forfeited her humanity, the grandeur of her mission as the eldest daughter of the church of Christ, and the apostle of civilization among the peoples. The demon in man’s shape, called Simon the Cordwainer, had disgraced his manhood by torturing a feeble, inoffensive child committed to his mercy, but he alone was responsible. The governing powers of the time were in total ignorance of his proceedings; France had no share in the blame or the infamy. The sensational legend of the Temple was bad enough, but at its worst no one was responsible but Simon, a besotted shoemaker. It was even hinted that the Dauphin had been rescued, and had not died in the Tower at all, and many tender-hearted Frenchmen clung long and tenaciously to this fiction. But at the appointed time one man, at the bidding of the great Secret-Teller, stood forth and tore away the veil, and discovered to all the world the things that had been done, not by Simon the Cordwainer, but by the Grande Nation in his person. M. de Beauchesne[16] was that man, and nobly, because faithfully and inexorably, he fulfilled his mission. It was a fearful message that he had to deliver, and there is no doubt but that his work—the result of twenty years’ persevering research and study—moved the hearts of his countrymen as no book had ever before moved them. It made an end once and for ever of garbled narratives, and comforting fables, and bade the guilty nation look upon the deeds she had done, and atone for them with God’s help as best she might.
In reading the records of those mad times one ceases to wonder at recent events. They give the key to all subsequent crimes and wanderings. A nation that deliberately, in cold, premeditated hate and full wakefulness of reason, decrees by law in open court that God does not exist, and forthwith abolishes him by act of parliament—a nation that does this commits itself to the consequences. France did this in the National Convention of 1793, and why should she not pay the penalty?
Of all the victims of that bloody period, there is none whose story is so touching as that of the little son of Louis and Marie Antoinette. He was born at Versailles on the 27th of March, 1785. All eye-witnesses describe him as a bright and lovely child, with shining curls of fair hair, large, blue eyes, liquid as a summer sky, and a countenance of angelic sweetness and rare intelligence—“a thing of joy” to all who beheld him. Crowds waited for hours to catch a glimpse of him disporting himself in his little garden before the palace, a flower amidst the flower-beds, prattling with every one, making the old park ring with his joyous laughter. One day, when in the midst of his play, he ran to meet his mother, and, flinging himself into a bush for greater haste, got scratched by the thorns; the queen chided him for the foolish impetuosity. “How then?” replied the child; “you told me only yesterday that the road to glory was through thorns.” “Yes, but glory means devotion to duty, my son,” was Marie Antoinette’s reply. “Then,” cried the little man, throwing his arms, round her knees, “I will make it my glory to be devoted to you, mamma!” He was about four years old when this anecdote was told of him.
It is rather characteristic of the child’s destiny that two hours after the bereavement which made him Dauphin of France, and while his parents were breaking their hearts by the still warm body of his elder brother, a deputation from the Tiers Etat came to demand an audience of the king. Louis XVI. was a prey to the first agony of his paternal grief, and sent to entreat the deputies to spare him, and return another day. They sent back an imperious answer, insisting on his appearing. “Are there no fathers amongst them?” exclaimed the king; but he came out and received them. The incident was trifling, yet it held one of those notes of prophetic anticipation which now first began to be heard, foretelling the approaching storm in which the old ship of French royalty was to be wrecked.
On the 6th of October the palace of Versailles was stormed by the mob; the guards were massacred, the royal family led captives to Paris amidst the triumphant yells of the sans-culottes. Then followed the gilded captivity of the Tuileries, which lasted three years; then came the 10th of August, when this was exchanged for the more degrading prison of the Temple; then the Conciergerie—then the scaffold.
The Temple was a Gothic fortress built in 1212 by the Knights of the Temple. It had been long inhabited by those famous warrior-knights, and consisted of two distinct towers, which were so constructed as to resemble one building. The great tower was a massive structure divided into five or six stories, above a hundred and fifty feet high, with a pyramidal roof like an extinguisher, having at each corner a turret with a conical roof like a steeple. This was formerly the keep, and had been used as treasury and arsenal by the Templars; it was accessible only by a single door in one turret, opening on a narrow stone stair. The other was called the Little Tower, a narrow oblong with turrets at each angle, and attached, without any internal communication, to its big neighbor on the north side. Close by, within the enclosure of the Temple, stood an edifice which had in olden times been the dwelling-house of the prior, and it was here the royal family were incarcerated on their arrival. The place was utterly neglected and dilapidated, but from its construction and original use it was capable of being made habitable. The king believed that they were to remain here, and visited the empty, mouldy rooms next day, observing to Cléry what changes and repairs were most urgently required. No such luxurious prospect was, however, in store for them. They were merely huddled into the Prior’s Hotel while some preparations were being made for their reception in the tower. These preparations consisted in precautions, equally formidable and absurd, against possible rescue or flight. The heavy oak doors, the thick stone walls, which had proved safe enough for murderers and rebel warriors, were not considered secure for the timid king and his wife and children. Doors and windows were reinforced with iron bars, bolts, and wooden blinds. The corkscrew stair was So narrow that only one person could pass it at a time, yet new iron-plated doors were put up, and bars thrown across it at intervals, to prevent escape. The door leading from it into the royal prisoners’ apartment was so low that when Marie Antoinette was dragged from her children, after the king’s death, to be taken to the Conciergerie, she knocked her head violently against the upper part of it, exclaiming to some one who hoped she was not hurt, “Nothing can hurt me now!” The Abbé Edgeworth thus describes the access to the king’s rooms: “I was led across the court to the door of the tower, which, though very narrow and very low, was so overcharged with iron bolts and bars that it opened with a horrible noise. I was conducted up a winding stair so narrow that two persons would have had great difficulty in getting past each other. At short distances these stairs were cut across by barriers, at each of which was a sentinel; these men were all true sans-culottes, generally drunk, and their atrocious exclamations, re-echoed by the vast vaults which covered every story of the tower, were really terrifying.” For still greater security all the adjoining buildings which crowded round the tower were thrown down. This work of destruction was entrusted to Palloy, a zealous patriot, whose energy in helping to pull down the Bastile pointed him out as a fit instrument for the occasion. These external arrangements fitly symbolized the systematic brutality which was organized from the first by the Convention, and relentlessly carried out by its agents on each succeeding victim, but by no one so ferociously as Simon the shoemaker. The most appalling riddle which the world has yet set us to solve is the riddle of the French Revolution. The deepest thinkers, the shrewdest philosophers, are puzzling over it still, and will go on puzzling to the crack of doom. There are causes many and terrible which explain the grand fact of the nation’s revolt itself; why, when once the frenzy broke out, the people murdered the king, and butchered all belonging to him, striving to bring about a new birth, a different order of things, by a baptism of blood, the death and annihilation of the old system—many wise and solemn words have been uttered concerning these things, many answers which, if they do not justify the madness of the Revolution, help us to pity, and in a measure excuse, its actors; but the enigma which no one has ever yet solved, or attempted to solve, is the excess of cruelty practised on the fair-haired child whose sole crime was his misfortune in being the descendant of the kings of France.
The Princesse de Lamballe fell on the 3d of September at the prison of La Force. The National Guards carried the head on a pike through the city, and then hoisted it under the windows of the king, and clamored for him to come out and show himself. One young officer, more humane than his compeers, rushed forward and prevented it, and saved Louis from beholding the dreadful spectacle. The king was deeply grateful for the kind action, and asked the officer’s name. “And who was the other who tried to force your majesty out?” enquired M. de Malesherbes. “Oh! I did not care to know his name!” replied Louis gently. That was a night of horrors. The two princesses, Mme. Royale and Princess Elizabeth, could not sleep; the drums were beating to arms, and they sat in silence, “listening to the sobs of the queen, which never ceased.” But more cruel days were yet in store. Before the month was out the Commune de Paris issued a decree for the separation of the king from his wife and children. “They felt it,” says this curious document, “their imperious duty to prevent the abuses which might facilitate the evasion of those traitors, and therefore decree, 1st, that Louis and Antoinette be separated.
“2d. That each shall have a separate dungeon (cachot).
“3d. That the valet de chambre be placed in confinement, etc., etc.”
That same night the king was removed to the second story of the great tower. The room was in a state of utter destitution; no preparations of the commonest description had been made for receiving him. A straw bed was thrown down on the floor; Cléry, his valet, had not even this, but sat up all night on a chair. A month later (October) the queen and her children were transferred to the story over that now occupied by Louis in the great tower. On the 26th the Dauphin was torn from his mother under the pretence that he was now too old to be left to the charge of women, being just seven years and six months. He was therefore lodged with his father, who found his chief solace in teaching the child his lessons; these consisted of Latin, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. The separation was for the present mitigated by the consolation of meeting at meal-times, and being allowed to be together for some hours in the garden every day. They bore all privations and the insults of their jailers with unruffled patience and sweetness. Mme. Elizabeth and the queen sat up at night to mend their own and the king’s clothes, which the fact of their each having but one suit made it impossible for them to do in the daytime.
This comparatively merciful state of things lasted till the first week in December, when a new set of commissaries were appointed and the captives watched day and night with lynx-eyed rigor. On the 11th the prince was taken back to his mother, the king was summoned to the bar of the Convention, and on his return to prison was informed that he was henceforth totally separated from his family. He never saw them again until the eve of his death. The Duchesse d’Angoulême (Mme. Royale) has described that interview to us with her usual simplicity and pathos: “My father, at the moment of parting with us for ever, made us promise never to think of avenging his death. He was well satisfied that we should hold sacred his last instructions; but the extreme youth of my brother made him desirous of producing a still stronger impression upon him. He took him on his knee, and said to him, ‘My son, you have heard what I have said, but, as an oath is something more sacred than words, hold up your hand and swear that you will accomplish the last wish of your father.’ My brother obeyed, bursting into tears, and this touching goodness redoubled ours.”
The next day Louis had gone to receive the reward promised to the merciful, to those who return love for hate, blessings for curses. When the guillotine had done its work, the shouts of the infuriated city announced to the queen that she was a widow. Her agony was inconsolable. In the afternoon of this awful day she asked to see Cléry, hoping that he might have some message for her from the king, with whom he had remained till his departure from the Temple. She guessed right; the faithful servant had been entrusted with a ring, which the king desired him to deliver to her with the assurance that he never would have parted with it but with his life. But Cléry was not allowed the mournful privilege of fulfilling his trust in person; he was kept a month in the Temple, and then released. “We had now a little more freedom,” continues Mme. Royale. “The guards even believed that we were about to be sent out of France; but nothing could calm the agony of the queen. No hope could touch her heart; life was indifferent to her, and she did not fear death.”
Her son, meanwhile, had nominally become King of France. The armies of La Vendée proclaimed him as Louis XVII., under the regency of his uncle, the Comte de Provence. He was King of France everywhere except in France, where he was the victim of a blind ferocity unexampled in the history of the most wicked periods of the world.
The “freedom” which the Duchesse d’Angoulême speaks of lasted but a few days; the royal family were all now in the queen’s apartment, but kept under, if possible, more rigid and humiliating supervision than before. Their only attendants were a certain Tison and his wife, who had hitherto been employed in the most menial household work of the Temple. They were coarse and ignorant by nature, and soon the confinement to which they were themselves condemned so soured their temper that they grew cruel and insolent, and avenged their own privations on their unhappy prisoners. They denounced three of the municipals whom they detected in some signs of respect and sympathy for the queen, and these men were all guillotined on the strength of the Tisons’ evidence. The woman went mad with remorse when she beheld the mischief her denunciations had done. At first she sank into a black melancholy. Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth attended on her, and did their utmost to soothe her during the first stage of the malady; but their gentle charity was like coals of fire on the head of their persecutor. She soon became furious, and had to be carried away by force to a mad-house.
About the 6th of May the young prince fell ill. The queen was alarmed, and asked to see M. Brunier, his ordinary physician; the request was met with a mocking reply, and no further notice taken of it, until the child’s state became so serious that the prison doctor was ordered by the Commune to go and see what was amiss with him. The doctor humanely consulted M. Brunier, who was well acquainted with the patient’s constitution, and otherwise did all that was in his power to alleviate his condition. This was not much, but the queen and Mme. Elizabeth, who for three weeks never left the little sufferer’s pillow, were keenly alive to the kindness of the medical man. This illness made no noise outside the Temple walls; but Mme. Royale always declared that her brother had never really recovered from it, and that it was the first stage of the disease which ultimately destroyed him. The government had hitherto been too busy with more important matters to have leisure to attend to such a trifle as the life or death of “little Capet.” It was busy watching and striving to control the struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondists, which ended finally in the overthrow of the latter. On the 9th of July, however, it suddenly directed its notice to the young captive, and issued a decree ordering him to be immediately separated from Antoinette, and confided to a tutor (instituteur), who should be chosen by the nation. It was ten o’clock at night when six commissaries, like so many birds of ill-omen, entered the Temple, and ascended the narrow, barricaded stairs leading to the queen’s rooms. The young prince was lying fast asleep in his little curtainless bed, with a shawl suspended by tender hands to shade him from the light on the table, where his mother and aunt sat mending their clothes. The men delivered their message in loud tones; but the child slept on. It was only when the queen uttered a great cry of despair that he awoke, and beheld her with clasped hands praying to the commissaries. They turned from her with a savage laugh, and approached the bed to seize the prince. Marie Antoinette, quicker than thought, flew towards it, and, clasping him in her arms, clung despairingly to the bed-post. One of the men was about to use violence in order to seize the boy, but another stayed his hand, exclaiming: “It does not become us to fight with women; call up the guard!” Horror-stricken at the threat, Mme. Elizabeth cried out: “No, for God’s sake, no! We submit, we cannot resist; but give us time to breathe. Let the child sleep out the night here. He will be delivered to you to-morrow.” This prayer was spurned, and then the queen entreated as a last mercy that her son might remain in the tower, where she might still see him. A commissary retorted brutally, tutoyant her, “What! you make such a to-do because, forsooth, you are separated from your child, while our children are sent to the frontiers to have their brains knocked out by the bullets which you bring upon us!” The princesses now began to dress the prince; but never was there such a long toilet in this world. Every article was passed from one to another, put on, taken off again, and replaced after being drenched with tears. The commissaries were losing patience. “At last,” says Mme. Royale, the queen, gathering up all her strength, placed herself in a chair, with the child standing before her, put her hands on his little shoulders, and, without a tear or a sigh, said with a grave and solemn voice, “My child, we are about to part. Bear in mind all I have said to you of your duties when I shall be no longer near to repeat it. Never forget God, who thus tries you, nor your mother, who loves you. Be good, patient, kind, and your father will look down from heaven and bless you.” Having said this, she kissed him and handed him to the commissaries. One of them said: “Come, I hope you have done with your sermonizing; you have abused our patience finely.” Another dragged the boy out of the room, while a third added: “Don’t be uneasy; the nation will take care of him!” Then the door closed. Take care of him! Not even in that hour of supreme anguish, quickened as her imagination was by past and present experience of the nation’s “care,” could his mother have pictured to herself what sort of guardianship was in preparation for her son. That night which saw him torn from her arms and from beneath the protecting shadow of her immense love, beheld the little King of France transferred to the pitiless hands of Simon and his wife.
Simon was a thick-set, black-visaged man of fifty-eight years of age. He worked as a shoemaker next door to Marat, whose patronage procured for him the office of “tutor” to the son of Louis XVI. His wife is described as an ill-favored woman of the same age as her husband, with a temper as sour and irascible as his was vicious and cruel. They got five hundred francs a month for maltreating the “little Capet,” whom Simon never addressed except as “viper.” “wolf-cub,” “poison-toad,” adding kicks and blows as expletives. For two days and nights the child wept unceasingly, refusing to eat or sleep, and crying out continually to be taken back to his mother. He was starved and beaten into sullen silence and a sort of hopeless submission. If he showed terror or surprise at a threat, it was treated as insolent rebellion, and he was seized and beaten as if he had attempted a crime. All this first month of Simon’s tutorship the child was so ill as to be under medical treatment. But this was no claim on the tutor’s mercy; if it had been, he would have been unfitted for his task, and would not have been chosen for it. He was astonished, nevertheless, at the indomitable spirit of his victim, at the quiet firmness with which he bore his treatment, and at the perseverance with which he continued to insist on being restored to his mother. How long would it take to break this royal “wolf-cub”? Simon began to be perplexed about it. He must have advice from headquarters, and fuller liberty for the exercise of his own ingenuity. Four members of the Committee of Sûreté Générale betook themselves to the Temple, and there held a conference with the patriot shoemaker which remains one of the most curious incidents of those wonderful days. Amongst the four councillors was Drouet, the famous post-master of Sainte Ménéhould, and Chabot, an apostate monk. One of the others related the secret conference to Sénart, secretary of the committee, who thus transcribed it at the time: “Citizens,” asks Simon, “what do you decide as to the treatment of the wolf-cub? He has been brought up to be insolent. I can tame him, but I cannot answer that he will not sink under it (crever). So much the worse for him; but, after all, what do you mean to do with him? To banish him?” Answer: “No.” “To kill him?” “No.” “To poison him?” “No.” “But what, then?” “To get rid of him” (s’en défaire).
From this forth the severity of Simon knew no bounds but those of his own fiendish powers of invention. He applied his whole energies to the task of “doing away with” the poor child. He made him slave like a dog at the most laborious and menial work; he was shoe-black, turnspit, drudge, and victim at once. Not content with thus degrading him, Simon insisted that the boy should wear the red cap as an external badge of degradation. The republican symbol was no doubt associated in the child’s mind with the bloody riots of the year before; for the mere sight of it filled him with terror, and nothing that his jailer could say or do could persuade him to let it be placed on his head. Simon, exasperated by such firmness in one so frail and young, fell upon him and flogged him unmercifully, until at last Mme. Simon, who every now and then showed that the woman was not quite dead within her, interfered to rescue the boy, declaring that it made her sick to see him beaten in that way. But she hit upon a mode of punishment which, though more humane, proved more crushing to the young captive than either threats or blows. His fair hair, in which his mother had taken such fond pride, still fell long and unkempt about his shoulders. Mme. Simon declared that this was unseemly in the little Capet, and that he should be shorn like a son of the people. She forthwith proceeded to cut off the offending curls, and in a moment, before he realized what she was about to do, the shining locks lay strewn at his feet. The effect was terrible; the child uttered a piteous cry, and then lapsed into a state of sullen despair. All spirit seemed to have died out of him; and when Simon, perceiving this, again approached him with the hated cap, he made no resistance, gave no sign, but let it be placed on his little shorn head in silence. The shabby black clothes that he wore by way of mourning for his father were now taken off, and replaced by a complete Carmagnole costume; still Louis offered no opposition. He was taken out for exercise on the leads every day, and, to prevent the queen having the miserable satisfaction of catching a glimpse of him on these occasions, a wooden partition had been run up; it was loosely put together, however, and Mme. Elizabeth discovered a chink through which it was possible to see the captive as he passed. Marie Antoinette was filled with thankfulness when she heard of this, and overcoming her reluctance to leave her room, from which she had never stirred since the king’s death, she now used every subterfuge for remaining on the watch within sight of the chink. At last, on the 20th of July, her patience was rewarded. But what a spectacle it was that met her gaze! Her beautiful, fair-haired child, cropped as if he had just recovered from a fever, and dressed out in the odious garb of his father’s murderers, driven along by the brutal Simon, and addressed in coarse and horrible language. She was near enough to hear it, to see the look of terror and suffering on the child’s face as he passed. Yet, such strength does love impart to a mother in her most trying needs, the queen was able to see it all and remain mute and still; she did not cry out, nor faint, nor betray by a single movement the horror that made her very heart stand still, but, rising slowly from the spot, returned to her room. The shock had almost paralyzed her, and she resolved that nothing should ever tempt her to renew it. But the longing of the mother’s heart overcame all other feelings. The next day she returned to her watch-point, and waited for hours until the little feet were heard on the leads again, accompanied as before by Simon’s heavy tread and rough tones. What Marie Antoinette must have suffered during those few days, when she beheld with her own eyes and heard with her own ears the sort of tutelage to which her innocent child was subjected, God, and perhaps a mother’s heart, alone can tell. That young soul, whose purity she had guarded as the very apple of her eye, was now exposed to the foulest influences; for prayers and pious teachings he heard nothing but blasphemy and curses; his faith, that precious flower which had been planted so reverently and watered with such tender care, what was to become of it—what had become of it already? None but God knew, and to God alone did the mother look for help. He who saved Daniel in the lions’ den and the children in the fiery furnace was powerful to save his own now, as then; he would save her child, for man was powerless to help. One of Simon’s diabolical amusements was to force the prince to use bad language and sing blasphemous songs. Blows and threats were unavailing so long as the boy caught any part of the revolting sense of the words; but at last, deceived no doubt by the very grossness of the expressions, and unable to penetrate their meaning, he took refuge from blows in compliance, and with his sweet childish treble piped out songs that were never heard beyond the precincts of a tavern or a guard-house. The queen heard this once. Angels heard it, too, and, closing their ears to the loathsome sounds, smiled with angels’ pity on the unconscious treason of their little kindred spirit.
But this new crisis of misery was not of long duration to Marie Antoinette. About three days after her first vision of Simon and his victim, the commissaries entered her room in the dead of the night, and read a decree, ordering them to convey her to the Conciergerie. This was the first step of the scaffold. The summons would have been welcome to the widow of Louis XVI., if she had not been a mother; but she was, and the thought of leaving her son in the hands of men whose aim was not merely to “slay the body,” but to destroy the soul, made the prospect of her own deliverance dreadful to contemplate. But God was there—God, who loved her son better and more availingly than even she loved him. She committed him once more to God, and commended her daughter to the tender and virtuous Elizabeth, little dreaming that the same fate which had befallen the brother was soon to be awarded to the gentle, inoffensive sister.
On the same day that the queen was sent to the Conciergerie, preparatory to her execution, a member of the Convention sent a toy guillotine as a present to “the little Capet,” doubtless with the merciful design of acquainting the poor child with his mother’s impending fate. A subaltern officer in the Temple, however, had the humanity to intercept the fiendish present, for the young prince never received it. It was the fashion of the day to teach children to play at beheading sparrows, which were sold on the boulevards with little guillotines, by way of teaching them to love the republic and to scorn death. It is rather a curious coincidence that Chaumette, the man who sent the satanic toy to the Dauphin, was himself decapitated by it a year before the death of the child whom he thought to terrify by his cruel gift.
While the mock trial of the queen was going on, Simon pursued more diligently than ever his scheme of demoralization. A design which must first have originated in some fiend’s brain had occurred to him, and it was necessary to devise new means for carrying it into execution. He would make this spotless, idolized child a witness against his mother; the little hand which hers had guided in forming its first letters, and taught to lift itself in prayer, should be made an instrument in the most revolting calumny which the human mind ever conceived. Simon began to make the boy drink; when he attempted to refuse, the liquor was poured into his mouth by force; until at last, stupefied and unconscious of what he was doing, unable to comprehend the purpose or consequence of the act, he signed his name to a document in which the most heinous accusations were brought against his august mother. The same deposition was presented to his sister for her signature; but without the same success. “They questioned me about a thousand terrible things of which they accused my mother and my aunt,” says Mme. Royale; “and, frightened as I was, I could not help exclaiming that they were wicked falsehoods.” The examination lasted three hours, for the deputies hoped that the extreme youth and timidity of the princess would enable them to compel her consent to sign the paper; but in this they were mistaken. “They forgot,” continues Mme. Royale, “the life that I had led for four years past, and, above all, that the example shown me by my parents had given me more energy and strength of mind.” The queen’s trial lasted two entire days and nights without intermission. Not a single accusation, political or otherwise, was confirmed by a feather’s weight of evidence. But what did that signify? The judges had decreed beforehand that she must die. Hébert brought forward the document signed by her son; she listened in silent scorn, and disdained to answer. One of the paid assassins on the jury demanded why she did not speak. The queen, thus adjured, drew herself up with all the majesty of outraged motherhood, and, casting her eyes over the crowded court, replied: “I did not answer; but I appeal to the heart of every mother who hears me.” A low murmur ran through the crowd. No mother raised her voice in loyal sympathy with the mother who appealed to them, but the inarticulate response was too powerful for the jury; they dropped the subject, and when the counsel nominally appointed for her defence had done speaking, the president demanded of the prisoner at the bar whether she had anything to add. There was a moment’s hush, and then the queen spoke: “For myself, nothing; for your consciences, much! I was a queen, and you dethroned me; I was a wife, and you murdered my husband; I was a mother, and you have torn my children from me. I have nothing left but my blood—make haste and take it!”
This last request was granted. The trial ended soon after daybreak on the third day, and at eleven o’clock the same forenoon she was led to the scaffold.
Seldom has retribution more marked ever followed a crime, than that which awaited the perpetrators of this legal murder. Within nine months from the death of Marie Antoinette every single individual known to have had any share in the deed—judges, jury, witnesses, and prosecutors—all perished on the same guillotine to which they condemned the queen.
The captives in the Temple knew nothing either of the mock trial or the death which followed it. It is difficult to understand the motive of this silence, especially as concerns Simon. Perhaps it was owing to his wife’s influence that the young prince was spared the blow of knowing that he was an orphan. If so, it was the only act of mercy she was able to obtain for him. The brutalities of the jailer rather increased than diminished after the queen’s death. The child was locked up alone in a room almost entirely dark, and the gloom and solitude reduced him to such a point of despondency and apathy that few hearts, even amongst the cruel men about him, could behold the wretched spectacle unmoved. One of the municipals begged Simon’s leave to give the poor child a little artificial canary bird, which sang a song and fluttered its wings. The toy gave him such intense pleasure that the man good-naturedly followed up the opportunity of Simon’s mild mood to bring a cage full of real canaries, which he was likewise allowed to give the little Capet. The birds were tamed to come on his finger and perch on his shoulder, and had other pretty tricks which amused and delighted the poor little fellow inexpressibly. He was very happy in the society of his feathered friends for some time, until one unlucky day a new commissary came to inspect his room, and, expressing great surprise at “the son of the tyrant” being allowed such an aristocratic amusement, ordered the cage to be instantly removed. Simon, to atone for this passing weakness towards the wolf-cub, set himself to maltreat him more savagely than ever. The child, in the midst of the revolting atmosphere which surrounded him, still cherished the memory of his mother’s teaching; he remembered the prayers she had taught him, the lessons of love and faith she had planted in his heart. Simon had flogged him the first time he saw him go down on his knees to say his prayers, so the child ever after went to bed and got up without repeating the offence. We may safely believe that he sent up his heart to God morning and night, nevertheless, though he did not dare kneel while doing so. One night, a bitter cold night in January, Simon awoke, and, by the light of the moon that stole in through the wooden blind of the window, beheld the boy kneeling up in his bed, his hands clasped and his face uplifted in prayer. He doubted at first whether the child was awake or asleep; but the attitude and all that it suggested threw him into a frenzy of superstitious rage; he took up a large pitcher of water, icy cold as it was, and flung it, pitcher and all, at the culprit, exclaiming as he did so, “I’ll teach you to get up Pater-nostering at night like a Trappist!” Not satisfied with this, he seized his own shoe—a heavy wooden shoe with great nails—and fell to beating him with it, until Mme Simon, terrified by his violence and sickened by the cries of the victim, rushed at her husband, and made him desist. Louis, sobbing and shivering, gathered himself up out of the wet bed, and sat crouching on the pillow; but Simon pulled him down, and made him lie in the soaking clothes, perishing and drenched as he was. The shock was so great that he never was the same after this night; it utterly broke the little spirit that yet remained in him, and gave a blow to his health which it never recovered.
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.