“What have they decided to do with the young wolf? He has been taught to be insolent, and I will see that he is tamed. If he rebels, so much the worse for him, I warrant you! But what is to be done with him in the end? Send him out of the country? No! Kill him? No! Poison him? No! Well, what then?”
“We must get rid of him!” was the significant reply.
Such, indeed, was the real purpose of the inhuman leaders of the Revolution. They did not want to put the unfortunate Prince to death, they only wished to get rid of him; that is to say, to torture him to death by slow degrees, without anyone being able to say that he had been poisoned, strangled, hanged, or beheaded!
As soon as the Dauphin found himself in the garden, he began to call to his mother as loudly as he could. Some of the guards tried to quiet him; but he answered indignantly, pointing to Simon and the deputies:
“They will not, they cannot, show me the law that orders me to be separated from my mother.”
Astonished at his firmness and moved by his childish affection, one of the guards asked the cobbler whether no one could help the little fellow; but Simon replied sharply:
“The young wolf does not submit to the muzzle easily; he might know the law as well as you do, but he is always asking for the reasons of things—as if people were obliged to give him reasons! Now, Capet, keep still, or I will show the citizens how I beat you when you deserve it!”
The poor little prisoner turned to the deputies as if to appeal to their compassion, but they coldly turned their backs on him. He was to be got rid of! How could this be possible if he were left to the tender care of his mother?
Henceforth Simon’s cruelties toward his victim were redoubled. He understood at last what was expected of him, and wished to do credit to his task. The youth, the innocence, the indescribable charm of the little Prince, did not in the least diminish the ferocity of his jailer. On the contrary, it seemed as though the child’s delicate face, his clear eyes, his slender little hands, the nobility of his demeanor, only served to inflame the brutal passions of Simon and his wife. They felt the Prince’s refinement and delicacy, in contrast with their own uncouthness, as a personal affront; and their jealous rage, their implacable hatred, made them take a savage pleasure in attempting to degrade their charge to their own level and extinguishing in this scion of a royal house all recollection of his illustrious family and of his early education.
Still another circumstance added to Simon’s abuse of the Prince. Marat,[18] that bloody and ferocious hyena of the Revolution, died at last by the knife of Charlotte Corday. Marat had been a patron of Simon’s, and was largely responsible for the appointment of the cobbler as the Dauphin’s keeper—a position which carried with it a considerable income—and his sudden death threw Simon into a sort of frenzy. When he heard the news, he deserted his prisoner for the first time, and returned in a state of excitement and irritation that relieved itself in abuse and blasphemy. He drank quantities of wine and brandy, and then, inflamed with the liquor, his brain on fire, he dragged his wife and the Prince up to the platform of the Tower, where he smoked his pipe and tried to catch an echo of the far-away lamentations for his friend Marat.