She knew, she said, that he would die like a man, and that was her consolation, when, with a cruelty beyond measure, she was refused any information concerning his last moments.
Cléry, the valet, now, apart from her family, the dearest being to her in all the world, as the man who had been with the King during his last days,—Cléry was now a prisoner, and remained one during a whole month, during which time he had not the faintest approach to an opportunity to give the Queen the King’s last words, or place in her keeping the hair and ring with which the King had entrusted him.
About these relics there is a strange bit of tender history. One Toulan concealed under the most frantic demonstrations of Republicanism, a sacrificial devotion to the royal family. He feared these relics would be wilfully destroyed by some drunken, ruthless hand; and pretending that he would not allow the chance of their being delivered to the Queen, he insisted on their being placed under the keeping of the chief officers of the Commune.
The Queen asked very humbly permission to wear mourning for the King, and this was granted, on condition of extreme parsimony and meanness.
There was a special debate, in order to obtain the Dauphin a few shirts.
The more merciful men of the Revolution fully expected that the death of the King would be followed by the liberation of the Queen, her children, and the Princess Elizabeth. This hope being held out to the Princess Elizabeth, she carried the grateful news to the Queen, who heard it, without interest, and returned an answer almost stupid to this good news. Either she knew that a nation who had not spared her husband would not spare her, who had always been the least liked of the two, or she did not care to live. Probably the latter surmise is the nearer correct.
Her only expression of resolution took place when she was requested for her health’s sake to walk in the garden of the prison. She resolutely refused. She said she could not pass the door of the King’s prison—could not put her feet upon the stairs down which he had marched to death. It was only at the end of six weeks—at the close of February—that she consented, for the sake of the children, who never left her side, to walk on the platform at the top of the tower. Here, between the battlements of the parapet, she could be seen from the neighboring houses; and this tending to create pity, it was ordered that the spaces between the battlements should be filled up with boards—an order which pleased the Queen, for it shut out from her sight a city which, to her, appeared a mere charnel-house. This intended petty cruelty—which was a relief—took place towards the end of March.
The King had now been dead ten weeks, and Marie Antoinette had yet to live six cruel months.
Her bodily health was breaking, but she had no knowledge of this fact. Her heart was dead. She was simply decaying. For whole nights she would lie awake, never complaining, never showing signs of weariness.