Once locked in there, he was forbidden the use of pens, ink, and paper; no writing materials were allowed him until the national convention had commanded his appearance at the bar.
The large chamber assigned to the King was partitioned into four compartments; the first served as a dining-room, the second was Louis' bed-chamber, and his valet slept in the third; the fourth was a little cabinet contrived in a turret, to which the royal prisoner was fond of retiring. His bed-chamber was hung in yellow and decently furnished. A little clock on the chimney-piece bore on its pedestal the words "Lepante, Clockmaker for the King." When the convention had decreed France a republic, Louis' gaolers scratched out the last three words of the inscription. They hung in his dining-room the declaration of the rights of the Constitution of 1792, at the foot of which ran the legend: "First year of the Republic." This was their announcement to Louis that he had fallen from his king's estate.
Like a murderer of these days in the condemned hold, Louis had two guards with him night and day. They passed the day in his bed-chamber, following him to the dining-room when he took his meals; and in the dining-room they slept at night, after locking the doors of the apartments.
Their captivity was full of indignity for the illustrious unfortunates, whose guards were incessantly suspicious. If Louis addressed a question during the night to the valet who slept close to him, the answer must be spoken loudly. The members of the family were not allowed to whisper in their conversations, and if at dinner Louis, or his wife, or his sister chanced to speak low in asking anything of the servant who waited on them, one of the guards at the door cried, "Parlez plus haut!"
Apart from suspense as to the future, a terrible dreariness must have marked those days in the Temple. The early morning was given by the King to his private devotions, after which he read the office which the Chevaliers of the Order of the Saint-Esprit were accustomed to recite daily. His piety was not without its inconveniences to himself. The table was furnished with meat on Fridays, but Louis dipped a slice of bread in his wine glass with the remark: "voilà mon diner!" To the gentle suggestion that such extreme abstinence might be dispensed with, he replied: "I do not trouble your conscience; why trouble mine? You have your practices, and I have my own; let each hold to those which he believes the best."
His devotions engaged the King until nine o'clock, at which hour his family joined him in the dining-room,—that is to say, during the period in which it was still permitted him to communicate with them. He sat with them at breakfast, eating nothing himself; he had made it a rule in prison to fast until the dinner-hour. After breakfast the King took his son for lessons in Latin and geography, and whilst Marie Antoinette taught their daughter, sister Elizabeth plied her needle. The children had an hour's play at mid-day, and at one o'clock the family assembled for dinner. The table was always well supplied, but Louis ate little and drank less, and the Queen took nothing but water with her food.
After dinner the parents amused their children again as best they could, round games at the table being the favourite recreation. To these poor little pleasures succeeded reading and conversation, and at nine the prisoners supped. After supper, Louis took the boy to his bed-chamber, where a little bed was placed for him beside his own. He heard him recite his prayers, and saw him to bed. Then he returned to reading, and fell to his own prayers at eleven. When the doomed King, husband, and father was denied the solace of his family, the time that he had devoted to them was given almost wholly to his books. The Latins were his favourite authors, and a day seldom passed on which he had not conned afresh some pages of Tacitus, Livy, Seneca, Horace, Virgil, or Terence. In French he was especially fond of books of travel. He read the news of the day as long as he was supplied with it, but his not unnatural interest in the affairs of revolutionary France seemed to trouble his gaolers, and the newspapers were withdrawn from him. Thrown back upon his books, he studied more than ever, and on the eve of his death he summed up the volumes he had read through during the five months and seven days of his captivity in the Temple: the number was two hundred and fifty-seven.
Towards the end he suffered some brusque interruptions of his ignominious solitude. Three times he awoke to find a new valet in his bedroom. Chamilly's place in this capacity was taken by Hue, and Hue was succeeded by Cléry, who was all but a stranger to the King. Chamilly and Hue barely came off with their lives in the prisons to which they were removed from the Temple. The abandoned King took shock upon shock with not a little fortitude. He was skimming his Tacitus one day when the cannibals of September stopped under his window to brandish on a pike the bleeding and disfigured head of the Princess Lamballe.
Severely as they had guarded him, his gaolers began to double their precautions. The concierge of the dungeon, the chief warder,—all, in a word, who were specially charged with the keeping of the King, were themselves constituted prisoners of the Temple. Did you wait on Louis, or were you suffered to approach him, your person was searched minutely at the governor's discretion. Not the commonest instrument of steel or iron was allowed to be carried by anyone who went near the King: Cléry was deprived of his penknife. Every article of food passed into the prison for Louis' table was rigorously examined; and the prison cook had to taste every dish, under the eyes of the guard, before it was permitted to leave the kitchen. Never was suicide more strenuously denied to a man who had no thought of it.
The prisoners themselves were not spared the indignity of the search. Louis, his wife, and his sister had their cupboards, drawers, and closets ransacked; they were spoiled of knives, scissors, and curling-irons. Louis' pains were prolonged to the end. The courage he had mustered for death, and it was a very commendable portion, failed him a moment at the last. In his confessor's hands, on the morning of his death, whilst the carriage was waiting for him in the courtyard, he halted in his prayers. He had, as he thought, caught a note of tears on the other side of the partition, and he dreaded a second last embrace. His ear strained at the wall, whilst the priest's hand was on his head. But there was no weeping there, for Marie Antoinette was on her knees under her crucifix; and Louis went down to his carriage. There is no need to tell again the last scene of all....