To the north of the square keep which was the main outline of the Tower, a second building, an afterthought of the latter Middle Ages, had been added. It leant up against its larger neighbour, forming a kind of pent-house; its four storeys were far lower than those of the stronghold—the rooms into which each storey was partitioned were necessarily smaller and less convenient than those which they were to occupy later in the main tower: it was nevertheless necessary to lodge them here for the first few weeks, because this annex alone was furnished. It had been the residence of the Archivist in charge; its main room had been his drawing-room; the whole was ready for an immediate occupation.
To these Princesses and their train there was a portentous novelty in such a place. The King, a man, and one fond of hunting in all weathers, self-centred, negligent of his person, careless of any luxury save that of the table, saw nothing sharp in these surroundings: indeed, his sex, especially when it is leisured, can take what it finds in a campaign or accident with no great shock. But the women, who had in every moment of their lives been moulded by magnificence and ease, could not understand the place at all. Varennes had been a hurly-burly; the wretched three days just ended at the Feuillants a violent interlude; for the rest their pains and terrors of the past three years had been played upon a gorgeous scene. They had slept for a thousand nights of peril in very soft and bulging beds whose frames were thick with gilding, beds whose canopies were splendidly high and curtained like thrones. They had been surrounded for a thousand days of peril by silent servants trained and dressed in gorgeous livery for their work. They had looked out on great ordered gardens, and had walked over the shining floors of the palace. That was their protection: a habit of grand circumstance and continuous exalted experience against which the occasional horror and the strain of their lives could make no impression.
To-night, in the unaccustomed stillness of the Temple enclosure, they sat silent in the knowledge that these low roofs and common walls must be a kind of home for them. All was at first insupportable; the King’s sister, sleeping on a ground-floor, in a room which once the cooks of the house inhabited: next to her through the wall, the Guard-Room; the Queen, the royal children and their governess, cooped up in a couple of small bedrooms fifteen feet square or less, preparing their own beds and the Dauphin’s, were in a new, worse world. The poor Princesse de Lamballe, with her own great virtue of fidelity surviving all her inanities, put a truckle bed for herself in the dark little passage between the two rooms and slept there, as a dog sleeps at the door of its mistress. Nor did even this society endure. A week had not passed when the officers came by night to read a new decree, and to separate the Duchesse de Tourzel and the Princesse de Lamballe from their masters, saying: “There must be no one here but Capetians.” Then the complete isolation of their lives, a new habit, of settled hours and monotonous exactitude, began.
This life reflected as in a quiet mirror the chaos of the enormous struggle which was being fought out beyond the walls of the Temple. They were prisoners and yet unrestricted; confined by public authority and yet permitted the refinements of their rank. Surrounded by guardians, but by guardians none of whom as yet insulted them, many of whom were secretly their friends, some few their devoted servants, traitors to the State in the crisis of a great war but traitors through devotion to a national tradition.
Twenty courses at a meal were not thought too many; a dozen servants, paid fantastic salaries, did not suffice them; their expenditure, if not the half million voted, was yet at the rate of many thousands a year; the doctor and the drawing master may visit them, and the Duchesse de Gramont may send them books. Their wine, though the King alone drank it, was of the best, commonly champagne (at that time not the fashionable wine of the rich, but rather the ritual of feast days); they had good furniture at their demand, an ample library of many hundred volumes; and in general such comfort as such a situation could afford. But a violent contrast marked their lives, the contrast between this luxury and the anarchy of manners around them. Their guards, often gentlemen, were now courteous, now obsequious, now offensive, according as chance sent men of varying politics or character by turn to be on duty at the Tower.
The alternate fears and expectations of the Revolution, the doubtful chances of the frontier battles, the unsettled quarrel of the political parties among the conquerors—all these permit the inconsistencies of that moment upon the part of the Commune and the Parliament. They permit within the Tower that mixture of the prison and the home whereby an increasing severity of rule and an increasing vexation did not forbid the costly furniture, the very complete library, the exquisite cooking which make up the curious contrast of their lives.
The order of their day was simple and unchangeable. The King would rise at six, shave, dress, and read till nine. The Queen and the Dauphin were up by eight, at which hour the servants and the guard came into the rooms. At nine they breakfasted. During the morning great care was taken by Louis himself with the lessons of the boy. The Queen and her sister-in-law dressed for the day. They walked in the large gardens where the mob from far off could watch them from behind the railings of the Square; dined at two o’clock, played cards. The King would sleep in the afternoon, would sup again at nine, and read till midnight.
A week after the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Tourzel had left them, before the end of August, the first of the indignities offered to the person of the Monarch came to him thus: they took away his sword. It was but an ornament, yet in all that long line of ancestry no other had had his sword unclasped. And this man, who could never have used a true sword, let alone that toy, felt the loss like a wound. Much at the same time, that is before the end of August, entered three new people into the prison—Tison and his wife, new gaolers who had to act as spies upon them; and Cléry, who was to act as the valet of Louis, who was devoted to him, and who has left us what is certainly the clearest and probably the most accurate account of the prison life of the family.
In those same days they heard whispered to them by one of the guards, Hue, the first news they had had upon the matter that never left their thoughts. The invasion was successful. Brunswick was well on his way—it was impossible that he should be opposed.