A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, Part IV., 1795 / Described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady: with General and Incidental Remarks on the French Character and Manners - Charlotte Biggs

* -"Je suis las de la portion de tyrannie que j'exerce."—-"I am weary of the portion of tyranny which I exercise." Rabaut de St. Etienne

—The remains of the Brissotins, with their newly-acquired authority, have vanity, interest, and revenge, to satiate; and there is no reason to suppose that a crime, which should favour these views, would, in their estimation, be considered otherwise than venial. To these are added Sieyes, Louvet, &c. men not only eager to retain their power, but known to have been of the Orleans faction, and who, if they are royalists, are not loyalists, and the last persons to whose care a son of Louis the Sixteenth ought to have been intrusted.

At this crisis, then, when the Convention could no longer temporize with the expectations it raised—when the government was divided between one party who had deposed the King to gratify their own ambition, and another who had lent their assistance in order to facilitate the pretensions of an usurper—and when the hopes of the country were anxiously fixed on him, died Louis the Seventeenth. At an age which, in common life, is perhaps the only portion of our existence unalloyed by misery, this innocent child had suffered more than is often the lot of extended years and mature guilt. He lived to see his father sent to the scaffold—to be torn from his mother and family—to drudge in the service of brutality and insolence—and to want those cares and necessaries which are not refused even to the infant mendicant, whose wretchedness contributes to the support of his parents.*

* It is unnecessary to remind the reader, that the Dauphin had been under the care of one Simon, a shoemaker, who employed him to clean his (Simon's) shoes, and in any other drudgery of which his close confinement admitted.