I stood amongst those at the foot of the scaffold.
I will say no more than this—Louis died bravely, and like a man. And I think the people were sorry. Of course they had more to regret before the Reign of Terror was over.
Robespierre changed nothing in his mode of life after he came to Duplay’s. He drank water, he lived very temperately and frugally, was always master of himself. By the way, another of Duplay’s daughters coming home, Maximilian actually fell in love with her, in a grave, calm way; and it was agreed that, when liberty was completely obtained, and France was at peace, that they should be married, live in a cottage, and hide away from the world.
I had frequently been at the Temple during the incarceration of the King, and often saw various members of the unhappy family. I am desirous that my hearers should believe that the men who surrounded the Capets in their imprisonment, were no more good examples of the revolutionary masses than I am an angel. A few hundred ferocious men rose to the surface of the Revolution, and disgraced it. At heart, its adherents sought to make France happy, and the people richer.
But let me return to the course of events.
There is very little known of what the widowed Queen did or said during the night before the execution, and upon that morning itself, beyond the fact that she passed from prayer to insensibility continuously. The entire family seem to have been conscious, from the first, that the separation with the King, on the eve of the execution, was final—that his promise to see them in the morning was a pious fraud.
As the morning progressed, after she knew by the lessening noise of the drums that he was on the way to execution, her great anxiety appeared to be to ascertain the exact moment when he died, so that from praying for him, she might entreat his soul to pray and plead for her and his children.
The loud cries of “Long Live the Republic,” and the rumbling return of the cannon, were the first evidences she received that all was over.
She appears from that time to have passed into a state of half-unconscious moroseness—a condition which is one of the mercies of nature, and which only ended in her life.