It was eight o’clock when they were told that they might go down with the children and see the King.
The Family met together and for a little time were silent.
The spell was on them which we never mention—one which the inmost mind refuses—I mean that fear....
AUTOGRAPH DEMAND OF LOUIS XVI FOR A RESPITE OF THREE DAYS
During this long isolation of theirs they had become very fixed upon the matter of the Catholic Faith, but that fear pervaded them as the Church has said that it must always pervade the last hours. This human curse, too sacred for rhetoric and too bewildering to occupy a just and reasonable prose, I will abandon, content only to have written it down—for it was the air and the horror of that night.
For not quite two hours they sat together, not speaking much, for all understood, except the little boy: he was sad as children are, up to their usual pitch of sadness, for any loss, great or small, which they do not understand: he saw his own sister, a child older than he, and all his grown-up elders thus crushed, and he also was full of his little sorrow. He knew at least that his father was going away.
The King, seated with his wife on his left and his sister at his right hand, drew the boy towards him and made him stand between his knees. He recited to him, as it is proper to recite to children, words whose simplicity they retain but whose full purport they cannot for the moment understand. He told the child never to avenge his death, and, since oaths are more sacred than repeated words, he took and lifted up his small right hand. Then, knowing that the will of the sufferer alone can put a due term to such scenes, he rose. His wife he pressed to his shoulder. She caught and grasped to her body her little children—to hold so much at least firm in this world that was breaking from around her. She knew that Louis desired them to leave, and she said, after she had wildly sworn that she would stay all night and the children with her (which he would not have):
“Promise that you will see us again?”