For precisely as Louis appears to have had no conception of the monstrosity of putting a woman to death, so the Queen, in leaving the Temple, appears not to have supposed for one moment that the Princess Elizabeth would be claimed by the scaffold,—she who had led the life of a true woman, who had nursed and helped the people, and never joined in the frivolities of the Court.
The Queen was taken to the prison of the Conciergerie, which is composed of the dungeons below high water mark, to be found amongst the foundations of the Palace of Justice.
To a wretched cell, having in one corner a straw bed, and by the light of one candle, was the ex-Queen taken.
A woman desirous of death in the dungeon of a stronghold, and yet they only believed her safe when two soldiers, swords drawn, stood at the outer door watching, with orders not to lose sight of the Widow Capet, even when asleep.
Madam Richard, that good woman who tended Charlotte Corday in her last moments, was the Queen’s most humane gaoler. She found something like furniture for the cell, procured wholesome food for the captive, and often brought a low-whispered message from the royal prisoners still in the Temple.
A little while, and the dampness of the cell rotted the Queen’s only dresses—two very common ones; and her underclothing becoming in tatters, she was half naked.
CHAPTER LIX.
MARIE ANTOINETTE FINDS PEACE AT LAST.
Marie Antoinette in her last prison, however, was not without pitying friends. The fierce communists ordered that she should drink the water of the Seine, drawn as it flowed past her prison-walls; but an honest couple, named Bault, obtained the posts of chief gaolers at the Conciergerie, in the full aim of assuaging the Queen’s wretchedness. Instead of Seine water, the poor prisoner found daily in her cell refreshing draughts of water drawn from that well at Versailles which was the Queen’s chief cellar. She was a great water drinker.
Madame Bault, to affect harshness, never entered the Princess’s cell, asserting that to do so was to be contaminated. The royal tradespeople of former days—especially the fruit-women—brought little offerings secretly; and so it came about that the Queen, in her last prison and days, ate such pure, simple meals as those which had been her favorite food in the old days—a piece of melon, a handful of figs, a little bread and a glass of water from her favorite well.