For many months no one had trodden the corridor of the place; the bricks of the flooring beneath their feet lay unevenly. The blank and whitewashed walls, cracked and neglected, were pierced by four such similar little doors as monasteries use for an entrance to their cells, and in those four bare cells the Parliament had hurriedly provided what furniture the old house afforded.
The Dauphin had awakened for a moment in the fresh air, and had smiled; he had said, so that those near could hear him: “I am to sleep in mamma’s room to-night!” His mother had promised it him as a reward during the dreadful day; he slept when the doors closed on them, and his sister slept too. The Queen was too angry for repose.
She saw the monk’s bed of the cell, little and hard; she saw the mouldy green paper on the wall; she stamped for one last futile time into the King’s presence beyond the partition to cry that things should surely have turned differently.
“The Marseillese should have been driven back!”
Louis had never failed to meet her anger when it rose by a stolid truth. “Who was to drive them back?” he said.
Then she, who had not understood the armed nature of the struggle, but only her own fierce desire, turned back and threw herself upon the narrow bed of her refuge.
The day already glimmered. One could see the trees of what had been but yesterday her royal garden, and one could see the palace beyond through the dirty windows of the little room. The sun rose and showed her her misery more clearly. She could not sleep. It was not till the light in the east had risen above the many roofs of the Tuileries and had already thrown a slit of bright shining aslant into the room, that there fell upon her less a slumber than an unhappy trance of exhaustion.
There was silence while she slept. The mob had gone home exhausted. The carts, which had worked all night round the palace and in the gardens picking up the wounded and the dead, lumbered no more, and their crunching upon the gravel of the alleys had ceased. No wheels rattled in the Rue St. Honoré as yet, and the few that still maintained the sitting in the Parliament were attended by no more in the Tribunes than a few sleepy beings watching to the end. Outside in the still air all that could be heard was the early piping of birds.
For that little space Marie Antoinette lay broken but forgetful of the dreadful day.
Her sister-in-law, in whom self-sacrifice was permanent, watched her pitifully so lying for one hour and another. Then she woke the children and dressed them for the new day, silently, so as to spare their mother’s sleep, but that sleep did not endure. The Queen raised herself unrefreshed, and, when she saw the children, remembered their promise and their fall and said: “It will all end with us!...”