Meanwhile the Dauphine kept her rooms. She knew what desperate court would be pressed upon her husband and herself were the doors to be opened; nor did the Dauphin give a single order of the hundred that were already solicited of him, save that all should be ready for the whole Court to leave for Choisy. Early upon the morning of Saturday this seclusion was broken: long before the common hour of the palace, at half-past five, a roll of drums awakened its people, and the Princess came down with all her ladies to see the Sacrament carried through Versailles.
LOUIS XVI
FROM THE PRINCIPAL BUST AT VERSAILLES
Between a double row of the Guard, under the great canopy that was reserved for such solemnities, the priests carried the Viaticum, and about It in a long procession as It passed were the torches and the candles. She stood with her sister-in-law at the head of the crowd in the great hall outside the bedroom door; she endured the stench of corruption that filled the air, though every window was open to the morning; she caught, by her tall stature and straight carriage, the scene that was acting within.
Between the purple robes and the surplices, in the ring of waxen lights, she saw the old man whom alone she had respected and indeed loved in her new home attempt to raise himself, calling: “My great God has come to me.... My great God!” She saw him with what strength he had plucking the cotton cap from his head and failing in his effort to kneel. His face was no longer the face she had known, but crusted dark and hideous, swollen, horrible. She heard the Grand Almoner repeat the King’s strong phrase of repentance, passionately solemn, and she knew the voice so well that perhaps she also heard the mumble in which he urged its repetition. Then the doors closed; the Court dispersed. She regained her apartments, and the isolation and the strain returned. They told her of his increasing delirium, of the crowds that came from Paris daily, of the certain approach of death. So Sunday and Monday went by—the thirty-eighth, the thirty-ninth day.
The dawn of Tuesday broke upon a clear sky. It was the fortieth day.
The spring on that fine morning turned to summer, and before noon the Park was full of a crowd which moved as though on holiday. The Parisians had come increasingly since Sunday into Versailles. The inns were full, and at all the tables outside the eating-houses of the town the people eat their mid-day meal with merriment in the open air. Between the Park and the town, huge and isolated, already old, the palace alone was silent. There, each group shut close in its own rooms, awaited—the one dismissal, another the fruit of long intrigue, another, in a mixture of eagerness and dread, the new weight of royalty. It was the 10th of May, and still the agony endured. A candle burnt in a window above the courtyard. Passing groups looked up at it furtively; grooms, with bridles ready in their hands, glanced at it from beneath the distant doors of the guard-room, and saw it twice renewed, as one o’clock and two struck through the afternoon from the chimes of St. Louis. Three struck. They looked again and it was still shining.
Within, his head supported by Laborde the valet, his mind still clear, the old King still attempted with his distorted lips the answers to the prayers for the dying. He heard them faintly and more faintly in that increasing darkness which each of us must face. When the priest at last came to those loud words, “Go forth, thou Christian soul,” his murmuring ceased. The candle at the window was extinguished. The clatter of horse-hoofs rose from the marble court and the jangling of stirrups against mounting spurs. The Duke of Bouillon came to the door of the room, stood before the silent crowd in the Œil de Bœuf, and said with ritual solemnity: “Gentlemen, the King is dead!”
At that same hour on that same day a British man-of-war sailed into Boston harbour: she bore orders to impose the tax on tea which ultimately raised America.