For a moment there were voices in the courtyard, the tramp of many men upon the damp gravel, the creaking of the door, more distant steps in the garden, and the wheels of the coach far away at the outer porch. Then the confused noise of a following crowd dwindling westward till nothing remained but a complete silence in those populous streets, now deserted upon so great a public occasion.
REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONERS THAT ALL IS DULY ARRANGED
FOR THE BURIAL OF LOUIS CAPET AFTER HIS EXECUTION
For yet another hour the silence endured unbroken: ten o’clock struck amid that silence, and the quarter.... The Queen heard through the shuttered window the curious and dreadful sound of a crowd that roars far off, and she knew that the thing had been done.
Life returned into the streets beneath, the loud shrill call of the news-men, crying the news accursedly, came much too shrill and too distinct against the walls. All day long, on to the early closing of the darkness, the mists gathered and lay thick over Paris and around her high abandoned place.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE HOSTAGE
From the 21st of January 1793 to three in the morning of the
2nd of August 1793
THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching him, she murmured that he was of the age at which his brother had died, at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest were the most blessed. In the last silences of the January night, till past two in the morning, the woman Tison, who was in part their gaoleress and in part a spy upon them, heard them talking still, and when she came to them Madame Elizabeth said: “For God’s sake leave us.”