Louis was never left alone. Two guards were constantly with him day and night, as is the rule to this day with condemned malefactors in France. They sat with him in the dining-room when at meals and slept in the immediate neighborhood of his bedroom. His guards were in the last degree suspicious, and he endured many indignities at their hands. No whispering was allowed, not even with his wife and children. If he spoke to his valet, who slept in his room at night, it must be audibly, and the King was constantly admonished to speak louder. No writing materials were allowed him at first. He was forbidden to use pens, ink and paper until he was arraigned before the National Convention. But he was not denied the solace of books, and read and re-read his favorite authors. In Latin he preferred Livy, Cæsar, Horace, Virgil. In French he preferred books of travel. For a time he was supplied with newspapers, but his gaolers disliked his too great interest in the progress of the Revolution, and the news of the day was withheld from him. His reading became the more extensive and it was calculated on the eve of his death that he had read through 257 volumes during the five months and seven days of his captivity in the Temple.
The daily routine of his prison life was monotonously repeated. He rose early and remained at his prayers till nine o’clock, at which hour his family joined him in the breakfast room as long as this was permitted. He ate nothing at that hour but made it a rule to fast till midday dinner. After breakfast he found pleasant employment in acting as schoolmaster to his children. He taught the little Dauphin Latin and geography, while the Queen, Marie Antoinette, instructed their daughter and worked with her needle. Dinner was at one o’clock. The table was well supplied, but the King ate sparingly and drank little, the Queen limiting herself to water with her food. Meat was regularly served, even on Fridays, for religious observances no more controlled his keepers, and the King would limit himself to fast diet by dipping his bread in a little wine and eating nothing else. The rest of the day was passed in mild recreation, playing games with the children till supper at nine o’clock, after which the King saw his son to bed in the little pallet prepared by his own hands.
The time drew on in sickening suspense, but Louis displayed the unshaken fortitude of one who could rise above almost intolerable misfortune. Insult and grievous annoyance were heaped upon his devoted head. His valet was changed continually so that he might have no faithful menial by his side. The most humiliating precautions were taken against his committing suicide—not a scrap of metal, not even a penknife or any steel instrument was suffered to be taken in to him. His food was strictly tested and examined; the prison cook tasted every dish under the eyes of a sentry, to guard against the admixture of poison. The most horrible outrage of all was when the bloodthirsty sans-culottes thrust in at his cell window the recently severed and still bleeding head of one of the favorites of the court, the Princess de Lamballe.
We may follow out the dreadful story to its murderous end. Years of tyrannous misgovernment in France, innumerable deeds of blood and cruel oppression, such as have been already presented in this volume, culminated in the sacrifice of the unhappy representative of a system to which he succeeded and innocently became responsible for. The bitter wrongs endured for centuries by a downtrodden people, goaded at length to the most sanguinary reprisals, were avenged in the person of a blameless ruler. Louis XVI was a martyr beyond question; but he only expiated the sins of his truculent and ferocious forerunners, who had no pity, no mercy, no compassion for their weak and helpless subjects. Louis’ trial, under a parody of justice, and his execution amid the hideous gibes of a maddened, merciless crowd, was the price paid by the last of the French kings, for years of uncontrolled and arbitrary authority.
The day of arraignment, so long and painfully anticipated, came as a sudden surprise. On Monday, December 10th, 1793, the captive King when at his prayers was startled by the beating of drums and the neighing of horses in the courtyard below the Donjon. He could not fix his attention on the morning lesson to his son, and was playing with him idly when the visit of the Mayor of Paris roused him and summoned him by the name of Louis Capet to appear at the bar of the Convention. He then heard the charges against him, and the day passed in mock proceedings of the tribunal. The King’s demeanor was brave, his countenance unappalled by the tumultuous outbursts that often came from the audience in the galleries. As the judges could come to no agreement on the first day, the proceedings were declared “open,” to be continued without intermission. For three more days the stormy debates lasted and still the Convention hesitated to pass the death sentence on the King. In the end it was carried by a majority of five.
Louis XVI bore himself like a brave man to the last. He addressed a farewell letter to the Convention in which he said, “I owe it to my honor and to my family not to subscribe to a sentence which declares me guilty of a crime of which I cannot accuse myself.” When he was taken to execution from the Temple and first saw the guillotine, he is said to have shuddered and shrank back, but quickly recovering himself he stepped out of the carriage with firmness and composure and, calmly ascending the scaffold, went to his death like a brave man.
The Bastile was gone, but the need for prisons was far greater under the reign of liberty, so-called, than when despotic sovereigns ruled the land. The last of them, Louis XVI, would himself have swept away the Bastile had he been spared. He had indeed razed For-l’Evèque and the Petit Châtelet, and imported many salutary changes into the Conciergerie out of his own private purse. During the Revolutionary epoch many edifices were appropriated for purposes of detention, the ordinary prisons being crowded to overflowing. In the Conciergerie alone, while some two thousand people waited elsewhere for vacancies, there were from one thousand to twelve hundred lodged within the walls without distinction of age, sex or social position. Men, women and children were herded together, as many as fifty in the space of twenty feet. A few had beds, but the bulk of them slept on damp straw at the mercy of voracious rats that gnawed at their clothing and would have devoured their noses and ears had they not protected their faces with their hands.
Within six months of 1790, 356 prisoners were confined in the prisons of Bicêtre, Luxembourg, the Carmelites and Saint Lazare, en route to the guillotine. St. Pélagie held 360 at one time. “In Paris,” says Carlyle, “are now some twelve prisons, in France some forty-four thousand.” Lamartine’s figures for Paris are higher. He gives the number of prisons as eighteen, into which all the members of the Parliament, all the receivers-general, all the magistrates, all the nobility and all the clergy were congregated to be dragged thence to the scaffold. Four thousand heads fell in a few months. A number of simple maidens, the eldest only eighteen, who had attended a ball at Verdun when it was captured by the Prussians, were removed to Paris and executed. All the nuns of the Convent of Montmartre were guillotined, and next day the venerable Abbé Fenelon. In September, 1792, there was an indiscriminate massacre, when five thousand suspected persons were torn from their homes and either slaughtered on the spot or sent to impromptu prisons. That of the Abbaye ran with blood, where 150 Swiss soldier prisoners were murdered at one sweep. The details of these sanguinary scenes are too terrible to print. Every prison provided its quota of victims—La Force 80, the great Châtelet 220, and 290 from the Conciergerie.
“At Bicêtre,” says Thiers, in his history of the Revolution, “the carnage was the longest, the most sanguinary, the most terrible. This prison was the sink for every vice, the sewer of Paris. Everyone detained in it was killed. It would be impossible to fix the number of victims, but they have been estimated at six thousand. Death was dealt out through eight consecutive days and nights; pikes, sabres, muskets did not suffice for the ferocious assassins, who had recourse to guns.” Another authority, Colonel Munro, the English diplomatist, reported to Lord Grenville that Bicêtre was attacked by a mob with seven cannon, which were loaded with small stones and discharged promiscuously into the yards crowded with prisoners. Three days later, he writes: “The massacre only ended yesterday and the number of the victims may be gathered from the time it took to murder them.” He puts the total at La Force and Bicêtre at seven thousand, and the victims were mostly madmen, idiots and the infirm.
The picture of these awful times is lurid and terrible, and brings the prevailing horror vividly before us. The prisons of Paris were thirty-six in number, all of large dimensions, with ninety-six provisional gaols. In the French provinces the latter were forty thousand in number, and twelve hundred more were regularly filled with a couple of hundred inmates. The most cruel barbarities were everywhere practised. Prisoners were starved and mutilated so that they might be driven into open revolt and justify their more rapid removal by the guillotine. Paris sent 2,600 victims to the scaffold in one year. In the provincial cities the slaughter was wholesale. Lyons executed 1,600, Nantes, 1,971, and a hundred were guillotined or shot daily. Many were women, some of advanced age and infirm. At Angers, to disencumber the prisons, 400 men and 360 women were beheaded in a few days. Wholesale massacres were perpetrated in the fusillades of Toulon and the drownings of Nantes, which disposed of nearly five thousand in all. Taine says that in the eleven departments of the west half of France a million persons perished, and the murderous work was performed in seventeen months.