By not one word, tending to save herself, did she injure the memory of her husband.
One line in the trial is enough to show what a mockery it was.
The Public Prosecutor cried, “All France bears witness against this woman!”
For form’s sake, the jury deliberated an hour. She was recalled to hear her sentence, but the cheering and screaming of the people told her its terrors before the judge spoke—death!
Nine months since the King died, and now there was an end to her weary waiting.
Asked if she had anything to say why the sentence of death should not be carried out, she respected herself in her very silence, and turned away, as though quite prepared for execution.
It was now five in the morning, and her last day was come. At half-past five she was permitted to write a letter to the King’s sister, Madame Elizabeth. This lady never saw it. The document was found long afterwards amongst the papers of one Couthon.
“I write to you, my sister,” she begins, “for the last time. I have been condemned, not to an ignominious death—that only awaits criminals—but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent as he, I hope to show such firmness as the King’s in his last moments. I grieve bitterly at leaving my poor children. You know that I lived but for them and you—you who, in your love, have sacrificed all for us. I learnt, at my trial, that you are separated from my little girl. In what a position I leave you! I dare not write to her; they would not give her my letter, and, indeed, I do not know that you will receive this.”
Some words of this final letter are inexpressibly touching. “Let my son never forget his father’s last words. Let him never seek to avenge our deaths!”
She then goes on to apologize for the child’s possible conduct to her, after the influence over him necessarily obtained by Simon, his tutor, and meekly she urges that he is so young he is incapable of knowing what he does.