She was deeply shocked when she learned in whose care her tender child had been placed, and horrified when she saw his appearance through her loophole, clad in the red suit of the Commune. But once as he passed, she heard him humming softly the air of a little cradle-song she used to sing him:
"Sleep, my child, and cease thy weeping!
Sleep, my child! my heart is sad."
By this she knew that his thoughts were still with her, and her heart was a trifle comforted.
But a great change was to come. At two o'clock in the morning, on the first of August, 1793, the Queen was awakened and told that she must prepare to leave the Temple Tower. She was transferred to the prison of La Conciergerie where she was kept two months and a half in a small, damp cell. After that she was obliged to undergo a trial that was even more of a flimsy mockery than the one accorded to Louis XVI. "Anything, anything to be rid of her!" was the one idea of this terrible tribunal. The end, like her husband's, was a foregone conclusion. On the sixteenth of October, she bravely, calmly, proudly gave up her life, happy in being reunited at last with her beloved husband, regretting only that she must leave her children to so uncertain a fate.
In the Tower of the Temple wept and waited poor Madame Elizabeth and Marie-Thérèse, all in ignorance of the Queen's fate. And on the floor below, also waited the persecuted child, who did not even know that his mother was gone from the room above, where he loved to think of her as watching over him.