Habituated by hunting in the royal forests to glade and covert, he had to content himself with a green yard, where a few withered trees scattered prematurely blighted leaves on four parterres of yellowed grass.
Every day at four, the royal family were "walked out" here, as if they were so many head of stall-fed cattle.
This was mean, unkind, ferocious in its cruelty; but less cruel and ferocious than the cells of the pope's dungeons where they had tried to drive Cagliostro to death, or the leads of Venice, or the Spielberg dungeons.
We are not excusing the Commune, and not excusing kings; we are bound to say that the temple was a retaliation, terrible and fatal, but clumsy, for it was making a prosecution a persecution and a criminal a martyr.
What did they look like now—those whom we have seen in their glory?
The king, with his weak eyes, flabby cheeks, hanging lips, and heavy, carefully poised step, seemed a good farmer upset by a great disaster; his melancholy was that of an agriculturist whose barn had been burned by lightning or his fields swept by a cyclone. The queen's attitude was as usual, stiff, proud, and dreadfully irritating. Marie Antoinette had inspired love of grandeur in her time; in her decline, she inspired devotion, but never pity; that springs from sympathy, and she was never one for fellow-feeling.
The guardian angel of the family was Princess Elizabeth, in her white dress, symbol of her purity of body and soul; her fair hair was the handsomer from the disuse of powder. The princess royal, notwithstanding the charm of youth, little interested any one; a thorough Austrian like her mother, her look had already the scorn and arrogance of vultures and royal races. The little dauphin was more winning from his sickly white complexion and golden hair; but his eye was a hard raw blue, with an expression at times older than his age. He understood things too well, caught the idea from a glance of his mother's eye, and showed politic cunning which sometimes wrung tears from those who tormented him.
The Commune were cruel and imprudent; they changed the watchers daily, and sent spies, under the guise of town officers. These went in sworn enemies to the king and came out enemies to the death of Marie Antoinette, but almost all pitying the king, sorrowing for the children, and glorifying the Lady Elizabeth. Indeed, what did they see at the prison? Instead of the wolf, the she-wolf and the whelps—an ordinary middle-class family, with the mother rather the gray mare and spitfire, who would not let any one touch the hem of her dress, but of a brood of tyrants not a trace.
The king had taken up Latin again in order to educate his son, while the queen occupied herself with her daughter. The link of communication between the couple was the valet, Clery, attached to the prince royal, but from the king's own servant, Hue, being dismissed, he waited on both. While hair-dressing for the ladies, he repeated what the king wanted to transmit, quickly and in undertones.
The queen would often interrupt her reading to her daughter by plunging into deep and gloomy musing; the princess would steal away on tiptoe to let her enjoy a new sorrow, which at least had the benefit of tears, and make a hushing sign to her brother. When the tear fell on her ivory hand, beginning to yellow, the poor prisoner would start back from her dream, her momentary freedom in the immense domain of thought and memories, and look round her prison with a lowered head and broken heart.