God has made a law whereby women are moved by strength and by weakness, but in different ways: by strength as a necessity for their protection, so that they demand it in men and in things and yet perpetually rebel against it; and by weakness as an opportunity for the exercise of all their nature, so that suffering (if it is sudden) or disaster calls out in women all of themselves: and this is especially true of mothers and sons.
That child, that boy, had seemed at first so rosy and so well in the old days at Versailles; his health had so contrasted with the sickly advance of Death upon his elder brother; he had been the hope of the throne. Then there had come upon him the curse of the men of his family; he had grown weaker and more weak; he had had nervous fits of rage, a nervous fear of noise unnatural to his age. Some had thought him deficient; all had noted with anxiety or with malice his increasing weakness during the period of the Royal Family’s imprisonment. Fits had seized him. But a few weeks before he had had convulsions; and all June, during the illness of which I have spoken, fears for him had already arisen: it was a rapid tragedy of childhood that was soon to end in death.[[34]] His mother’s devotion—having him now only for its object in the isolation of those stone walls—had become the whole of her being. That he had grown so dull, so failing, so more than common sickly, so odd, did but heighten in some way the mystic feeling in her. He was the King.... She was observed to pay him a certain reverence, and she served him at table (as spies thought at least) with the gravity of a ceremonial. All this at one abominable stroke she lost.
[34]. I take for granted the death of Louis XVII. in prison; it is certified, it is clear, and even were it not so the progress of his disease compels such a conclusion: but this book is not the place for a discussion upon the question, nor could so considerable a debate be discussed even in an Appendix.
She would watch him—oh, unhappy woman!—through chinks and chance places when the little chap was taken out to get the air, with gaolers, upon the roof for some few minutes of the day. He, of course, easily and at once forgot. He soon learnt to repeat the phrases he heard around him, laughed when his guardians laughed, and even asked, as he heard them ask, “whether the women still lived?” He played at ball a little with his gaolers; but he weakened still and he decayed. That child was the head of an authority older than Islam, and the heir to a family name older than the Sagas, and in his little drooping body were all the rights of the Capetians.
The Queen saw him, I say, for a few moments—now upon one day, now upon another—by chance, as he took the air with his gaolers. She had nothing more to lose—and her soul was broken.
July-October 1793.
ELEMENTS of the STRATEGIC POSITION
Those who were to destroy the new society of the French, to rescue or to avenge the Queen, were now once more at hand and now almost arrived.